


the gap between crack and thunder

by dickviolin



Series: crack and thunder [1]
Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Child Abuse, Depression, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Everyone Is Gay, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Physical Abuse, Recreational Drug Use, Smut, bc obviously, like orthodox monks????, oh and there's monks, sad boys being sad, sascha is an idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:23:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22992049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dickviolin/pseuds/dickviolin
Summary: blanket disclaimer for works containing sascha zverev. see notes for more detailsWithout Stef having noticed it, it’s started to pour with rain, and it’s sliding down the windshield to melt and bend the red light from outside. Sascha’s face is lit up like danger. They’re looking each other in the eye now. The silence in the car is filling Stef’s ears. His eyes fall on Sascha’s lips and-The light changes. Sascha blinks and turns away, and they don’t say anything else for the two minutes it takes for them to get to the hotel. They’re on opposite ends of the same floor so they take separate lifts, and they don’t say goodnight as they part. Stef tosses and turns until he finally falls asleep before dawn, and he tells himself it’s the drink and the adrenaline.
Relationships: Nick Kyrgios/Stefanos Tsitsipas, Stefanos Tsitsipas/Alexander Zverev
Series: crack and thunder [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1662028
Comments: 25
Kudos: 33





	the gap between crack and thunder

**Author's Note:**

> hi,
> 
> as you are probably aware if you pay attention to tennis, olya sharapova, sascha's ex-girlfriend, has made credible accusations of domestic violence against him (including screenshots and multiple witnesses backing up her testimony). if you are likely to be triggered by things like that, i would not recommend reading her instagram posts/interviews with her; the details she has given are graphic, shocking and utterly sickening. 
> 
> i'm not going to take any of my fics containing sascha down. i don't want to pretend that i didn't support him for eighteen months before all this came out. i don't want to pretend that we weren't all duped. i want these works to exist as a record of the dangers of thinking you know anything about someone in the public eye. if we write fiction about people, we're actually just writing about characters loosely based on what people allow us to know about themselves. 
> 
> however, i don't feel comfortable writing any more fic about sascha. i don't want to receive kudos for this- please don't leave them- and i will delete comments if and when they are left. please respect that, and please don't read this fic. 
> 
> believe women. exercise caution. be good to yourselves and others. we are all fighting invisible battles. 
> 
> ~dickviolin

It’s one of those expensive cars. The door slams shut with a satisfying sound. It’s dark. The driver hasn’t put the interior lights on. Stef can hear Sascha fiddling around with the seatbelt.

He glances to his left as the car pulls away. Sascha is looking out of the window. While waiting for him, Stef had tried to find the moon in the sky, but it was hidden behind a building or something. Maybe Sascha’s looking too.

“Are you still drunk?” Stef says at last.

“A bit,” Sascha replies, not looking round. “You?”

They’d chanted his name until he’d downed a vodka and coke, and then Roberto had ordered shots, and that was the most alcohol he’d ever drunk in his life.

“Yeah, kinda.”

Sascha finally leans back and looks ahead. “What?” he says, when he notices Stef looking at him.

“Nothing,” Stef replies. “Dunno. It’s been a good weekend, right?”

“A fucking good weekend,” Sascha replies. Stefanos can’t work it out. He can normally read the mood of a room fairly well, but Sascha has long been a mystery to him. And in any case, this isn’t a room, it’s a taxi, and they’re both drunk, and they’ve both just won a tournament. None of the normal rules apply. But it still bothers him. Bothers him that he can’t tell whether Sascha is fine and relaxed and happy, or counting down the seconds until they can go their separate ways and back to being rivals.

“I don’t hate you, you know,” Sascha says, like he’s read his mind.

“OK,” Stefanos says. He smooths his hands over the lap of his suit trousers.

“It’s just, y’know. We have to play each other. It’s probably not a good idea to get too friendly.” That doesn’t stop Rafa and Roger, Stef thinks, or, for that matter, Sascha and Domi, or Sascha and Diego, or any of his other friends on tour.

“And I say stupid shit in interviews all the time. So don’t take it personally, OK?”

“I don’t,” Stef says, irritated.

“OK. I just- I don’t want you to think that I’m some asshole who picks on people for random reasons.”

That's exactly what he is, but Stef lets it slide.

“It’s fine.”

The engine hums as they idle at a light. Stefanos wonders how much of the conversation the driver is picking up. Maybe he speaks Russian. If he does, he isn’t letting on, barely glancing at the two of them in the rear-view mirror. “Anyway, you played well. Against Milos, I mean. You played really well. You played well all weekend, but, I mean-”

“Thanks,” Sascha cuts him off. Without Stef having noticed it, it’s started to pour with rain, and it’s sliding down the windshield to melt and bend the red light from outside. Sascha’s face is lit up like danger. They’re looking each other in the eye now. The silence in the car is filling Stef’s ears. His eyes fall on Sascha’s lips and-

The light changes. Sascha blinks and turns away, and they don’t say anything else for the two minutes it takes for them to get to the hotel. They’re on opposite ends of the same floor so they take separate lifts, and they don’t say goodnight as they part. Stef tosses and turns until he finally falls asleep before dawn, and he tells himself it’s the drink and the adrenaline.

“Get up.”

Barked Russian rips through Sascha’s dream and he forgets it instantly. Maybe it was nice. Maybe it was really boring. He usually has boring dreams when he’s drunk. His father is stomping round his hotel room, ripping open curtains and turning on lights.

Sascha growls into his pillow.

“Get up. The cab will be here in half an hour.” That needling, nagging voice that makes his heart sink. He’s never- not once in his career- been given more than twelve hours to enjoy a victory. He sits up. The room is spinning. His mouth is dry.

“Cab,” he repeats to himself, hoping to put the day into some sort of order.

“To the airport. For the plane. To Beijing.”

“Beijing, right, yeah.” His father frowns at the piles of clothing and kit strewn around but doesn’t make to try and tidy it up.

“Half an hour,” he says, warningly, which Sascha knows means forty-five minutes and a mad dash down to the lobby, pulling his shoes on as he goes. He grunts his assent and his father leaves, slamming the door behind him for no apparent reason and making Sascha’s head pound. Not a moment too soon; he’s currently sporting the unfortunate side effects of the early morning. He’s leaking precum, too, he notices, as he shoves a hand down his pyjama bottoms to take care of it. Maybe his dream was lovely. Shame he can’t remember it now.

Last night filters through to him. There was the party, of course- he remembers Fabio heaving over a toilet bowl and then no more than two minutes later belting out ‘Man in the Mirror’ on the karaoke machine. He remembers Roger doing his worst dad-dancing, clearly having to make up for the fact that Rafa wasn’t there. And then he remembers yelling at Tsitsipas and chanting his name until he reluctantly downed a glass of vodka and coke.

“Rrrrrrussians are doin’ it for themselves!” he’d sung in Stef’s ear, nonsensically, when Eurythmics came on. And then some other things had happened- Fabio had been sick again- and then they’d all finally been herded into taxis. They’d ended up in the same one, him and Stef. Somehow.

His hand stills, then, because he remembers what happened. He remembers talking to Stef, trying and failing to get him to understand that he doesn’t hate him, honestly, and then looking into his eyes-

Sascha despises that sort of mushy talk about the colour of people’s eyes, but the dark of Stef’s is something he can’t forget.

And then he’d looked away. The lights changed. They drove on. Sascha strokes his thumb over the head of his dick. Had Stef been about to- and if he had, what would that have been like? Would he have tasted of vodka and coke, Sasch wonders? Or of something else? What would his lips have felt like? He’s jerking off in earnest now, and he pulls his hand away like he’s been scalded. Jesus- he’s not. He’s not. He’s not jerking off thinking about kissing a boy, thinking about kissing Stefanos Tsitsipas.

He hops out of bed and runs a cold shower, and, yep, that’s pretty much enough to kill any mood he might have had. He scrubs himself clean and then throws some clothes on, chucks his stuff into his bag and dives out to meet his dad in the lobby.

“You’re late,” his father says. Sascha says nothing, just sinks into the back seat of the cab. Stefanos Tsitsipas. That weird Greek kid he met when he was little. This is very, very bad news.

***

The first time Stef met Nick Kyrgios it was at an ATP party, and he was eighteen and Nick was twenty-one.

“You don’t drink.” Stef had wandered into the bathroom out of boredom and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw Nick sitting on the counter, one knee up against his chest, a glass in his hand.

“I-” They _had_ met before, briefly. Just long enough to say hello and exchange names, so Stef didn’t bother sticking his hand out again. “I, ah.” He stumbled over his words and finally gave up, not sure what he’d been trying to say in the first place.

“Must be shit, being at a party like this, not drinking.”

Stef had shrugged. Nick was fixing him with those danger-dark eyes. He’d not really got a good look at him the first time, and now he couldn’t stop. He felt that slow creeping embarrassment of attraction. _Jesus_. It was only a matter of time before he made an idiot of himself.

“Corporate bullshit parties are shit when you’re sober,” Nick went on. “Can I not tempt you?”

“I play tomorrow,” Stef had finally managed to say. “You don’t speak Greek?”

“Nah,” Nick scoffed. “My old man tried to teach me, but I was never any good at school.”

“Ah.”

“You speak good English, though.”

Stef wondered where he’d got that idea from, given that he’d barely opened his mouth. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “Thanks.”

And still that stare. Sometimes it seemed like Nick’s face was entirely blank, like there was nothing but fluff and replays of Celtics games between his ears, but sometimes he looked like he was thinking a million things at once.

“I better, ah. My dad-” Stef turned to go but Nick cut him off.

“Mate. Don’t be offended when I ask, right, but are you gay?”

Stef stopped dead. “I- what?”

“Are you gay? Or, like, bi? Do you like guys?”

“Do I-” Stef felt the bottom fall out of his stomach and his throat close up in fear.

Nick sighed and hopped down from the counter. “Mate, honestly, I’m just asking because- look, _I’m_ bi, I’m not asking to be a dick.”

“Oh,” Stef said.

“I’m asking because, like, if you are, there are things we can do that are more interesting than walking round a room full of suits stone cold sober.”

“Oh,” Stef said again.

“So are you? Or am I just making myself look like a dick?”

“I am,” Stef replied. “Gay. I’m gay.” Which was the first time, he realised, he’d said it aloud.

“Good.” Nick grinned, teeth wolf-sharp.

“How did you know?” Stef said. “Is it- it’s not obvious?”

“Nah, I just have a shit-hot gaydar.” Stef must have looked panicked, because his face softened and he went on, “Trust me, it’s fine. I don’t think anyone else knows, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was only asking on the off-chance. And cos I’m pissed.” Stef suddenly felt very hot and very aware of every noise around him, like the ice cubes clinking when Nick waved his glass.

“So, you want to?” Nick tilted his head towards one of the cubicles. Stef swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. Nick downed the rest of his drink and put the glass on the side. He took Stef’s wrist and pulled him into the stall and slid the lock behind them.

“You done this before?”

Stef nodded, once.

(_Before_ had been at the Academy. It had been one of the other boys crawling into his bed on Stef’s sixteenth birthday, when he was trying not to cry too loudly, because he was alone and he missed his parents and he didn’t know if he was going to make it as a player. The boy had been kind. He’d said, _it’s OK, Ste-fah-nos_, and let Stef cry into his chest. Then in the dark they had found each other. Fumbling hands and lips. He’d tasted of Haribo. Stef took them both in one hand and they grinded against each other until the spit of warmth and the other boy’s little sigh had sent him over the edge. _I’m gay_, Stef had thought to himself when the boy had retreated to his own bed. But he hadn’t had time to deal with that, with all it had entailed. He wiped his hand on the pillow and screwed his eyes shut. The other boy went home that autumn. Stef never saw him again.)

“’K,” Nick muttered, and pressed his lips to Stef’s. He tasted strong and fiery. He pushed Stef back against the partition wall and then dropped to his knees.

“You want me to-”

Stef nodded furiously, already half-hard. Nick took his cock out of his shorts, pushed them down a little so he could kiss and lick at the skin around the base, bury his nose in Stef’s pubes. Stef tried, but found he couldn’t be revolted. There was something so natural about it. Nick seemed to love it, eagerly nipping at the sensitive spot on his inner thigh. He gave Stef’s cock leisurely strokes until it was fully hard, red and straining. Precum leaked from the tip in thick drops. Finally, Nick took the entire length of it in his mouth, all at once. A moan was ripped from Stef’s throat. He tipped his head back against the wall. With one hand he steadied himself. The other he stuffed into the short, jagged crop of Nick’s hair. He didn’t press his head down, as much as he wanted to, but ran his hands along it, down to the nape of his neck. Light fingertips brushed his jawline. The bulge in Nick’s cheek where he was working around Stef’s length. Then he was coming, hard and loud down Nick’s throat.

“Fuck.” Nick rose to his feet and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You taste good.”

“Huh,” Stef said. He wasn’t really capable of coherent speech in Greek, let alone English. His chest rose and fell in heavy breaths.

“Where are your manners?” Nick said. When Stef looked at him blankly, he went on, “Return the favour, cunt. I’m dying here.”

Stef looked to where he was gesturing. There was an ungainly tent in his tight jeans.

“I never- never have-”

“Never sucked cock?” Nick was smirking and Stef felt his face go hot.

“No.”

“C’mere.” He leaned in and kissed Stef, less an embrace and more an invasion. He slipped his tongue under Stef’s upper lip and Stef could taste something different, something new, a sharpness, a bitter taste.

“That’s what you taste like,” Nick breathed. “That’s what it tastes like, right, when a guy comes in your mouth.”

“I like it,” Stef said, then immediately looked away. Nick huffed out a laugh.

“We’ll make a faggot of you yet, kid.”

He took Stef’s chin in his hand and turned his face towards him. Stef knew he was probably stronger than Nick. If he wanted to, he could have overpowered him. Shoved him back down on his knees for round two. Or thrown him up against the wall and buried his cock in him. He didn’t want to, though. He wanted to make him come, make him feel good in turn. _Faggot_. The word burned but felt like an honour. His sole act of transgression so far in his entire life. Rising star, always a sweetheart, collecting every last ball after a game- on his knees for the rude, bolshy Australian. Sucking cock. A _faggot_. Not so angelic. He kneeled in front of Nick and nuzzled with his whole face at the bulge in his jeans. Nick hissed through his teeth.

“You’re such a fucking tease. Go on, Steffi. Suck my cock.”

Stef unzipped him, and pulled him out, and tasted the salty tang of precum before the hot bitterness, and some of it spilled down his chin, and when he finally went back to the party his cheeks were red and his hair was messy and his dad asked him what was up. None of it mattered. He’d just given head in a public bathroom. He was officially an adult, doing rebellious adult things. Nick had caught his eye across the room and winked.

And that was how this began, him and Nick. Not quite a relationship. Not quite a fling. Not a friends-with-benefits situation- they don’t really hang out except to have sex, and Stefanos rather suspects Nick thinks he’s a bit of an idiot. The feeling’s mutual. Fuck-buddies, perhaps. Stef doesn’t like that, though, too staccato.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called when Nick has him on all fours on the bed and is pounding into him. There is the sound of skin slapping skin. Of Nick grunting. Stef breathing heavy. But other than that they are silent. There’s never anything to say.

It hurts like it did the first time, when Nick had carelessly warmed him up with two spit-lubed fingers and then shoved in without warning. Every time Stef lets out a little high yelp and afterwards Nick takes the piss out of him for it. It hurts until Nick starts moving, hitting the spot, and then the pleasure outweighs the pain.

“Fuck, Steffi, you’re so tight,” Nick grunts. He grabs Stef by the shoulder to pull him in and, yep, that’s going to hurt like a bitch at practice tomorrow.

“Please,” Stef chokes out, which is partially a _please keep hitting that exact spot_ but also a _please hurry up and come so I can jerk myself off and kick you out_. He has shit to do. Nick does come, pretty quickly, and lets out a long groan. Stef _could_ take the piss out of him, but he can’t be bothered.

“You want me to-” Behind him Nick pulls the condom off and tosses it in the waste paper bin.

“No,” Stef replies. He’s close anyway, and it only takes a couple of rough strokes before he’s coming into his hand. He wipes it off onto the duvet and collapses back next to Nick at the top of the bed.

Nick is scrolling through Instagram. His chest is heaving but he’s clearly moved on from the post-orgasm glow pretty quickly. They kiss at the start, but not at the end.

“You all good, Steffi?” he asks without looking up from his phone.

“Yep,” Stef replies. He reaches for his own and scans his Twitter notifications. He wondered, at first, why Nick insists on calling him Steffi. If he wanted to fuck a girl, he could- there’s no shortage of them. But he seems to keep turning up at Stef’s door to call him a girl’s name and have mediocre sex with him. Then again, Stef keeps letting him in.

“Penny for ‘em, Aristotle.”

God, it would be so much easier if Nick just spoke Greek and Stef didn’t have to learn all the annoying ways native English speakers express themselves without really saying what they mean. He has a notebook, not that he’d ever tell Nick, of all of his Australian nonsense. Anyway, ‘penny for ‘em’ means ‘why are you so quiet, tell me what you’re thinking, I’m a nosy bastard’.

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“C’mon. You’re never not thinking of something. What’s up?”

“Nothing is up. I’m fine.” Nick finally puts his phone down and folds his arms.

“Talk.”

Stef sighs. “It’s just- what are we doing?”

“You mean-”

“I mean, we’re having sex, but what does it mean?”

Nick’s face hardens. “Does it have to mean anything? Can it not just be fun?”

_It isn’t fun_, Stef thinks but doesn’t say, because if he does he knows they’ll get distracted talking about whether Nick is good in bed.

“Yeah. But is that it? Is just fun?”

“Do you want something more serious?”

_Yes_, Stef thinks, _but not with you_.

“It doesn’t matter, OK? Forget I said anything.”

Nick fixes him with a stare for a long moment but eventually just rolls his eyes and gets up. 

“Call me tomorrow, if you haven’t lost by then.”

“Or if you haven’t,” Stef shoots back without venom. This is part of the ritual. Nick will be all matey and Australian and make some crack and Stef will give back as best he can. _Banter_, he has written in his little notebook of English vocabulary: _When Nick’s being an asshole_.

Nick shrugs on his clothes and makes some more unfunny jokes and then leaves. Stef climbs into the shower. He always feels dirty when Nick comes round. Always has to scrub himself clean, top-to-toe. When he’s done, he curls up in bed and puts the TV on; on one of the channels he flicks to randomly _Gilmore Girls_ is on and for twenty minutes he numbs himself with mindless entertainment.

“Sort of a girly show, eh?” his dad used to say. Stef would just shrug and say something about guilty pleasures and practising his English.

His phone buzzes. A text, funnily enough, from his dad.

_Are you in bed?_

**Yes**, he sends back. If he doesn’t do it fast enough, his father will come round from his suite to knock on his door. It’s not as if it’s obvious what he and Nick have just done- the condom is in the bin and the sheets are dark enough to not show up the drying cumstains- but he still feels weird, the two of them in proximity.

“Does your dad know?” Nick had asked once. Casually. Off-hand. While jerking Stef off.

“Nope,” Stef had replied, hoping the finality of his tone would get through.

“You not gonna tell him?”

“Blow me,” he replied, and that changed the subject pretty fast.

He’s not going to tell his dad _now_, but he’s going to have to, eventually. He’s twenty-one and he doesn’t have a girlfriend. And at some point someone better than Nick is going to come along. His dad deserves to know, at least, when that happens.

_Go to sleep_, his dad replies. Stef turns off the TV and climbs under the covers, like he’s still six years old and his dad is standing at the top of the stairs to make sure his light is off and he’s not reading comic books by torchlight.

That night he dreams of a gangly German teenager speaking Russian, of Usher on the car radio. Of stars in the sky and bright blue eyes. He wakes up with a headache and rolls out of bed late.

***

Sascha crashes and burns in Qatar, then staggers on to Melbourne, where he’s bagelled in the third set by some Brazilian he’s never even heard of in the second round.

“You must be pretty disappointed,” someone says in the press conference after, which seems, in the surreal, dreamlike way time is moving right now, to be immediately followed by Jez bundling him into a car next to his dad.

“Where’s Mischa?” he says, because that’s really the only person he wants to see right now.

“Out,” his father says. “What happened?”

Sascha sinks into the duffel coat he’s wearing. He’s tired. His knee hurts. _God_, he just wants to go to bed. He doesn’t need debriefing. He doesn’t need to go over how painfully badly he’s fucked up.

“He was faster than me,” he mutters. “Uh, and I couldn’t get to his backhand.”

“Too many unforced errors,” his father adds, “And you’re double faulting again. You’re going backwards, boy.”

Jez doesn’t speak Russian but he’s not an idiot either, and Sascha can see him frown in the rear-view mirror.

“I’ll work on it.”

“You’ve already worked on it. You’re just not taking it in. Do better.”

Every syllable stings. He’s already been close to tears several times today. He burrows further into his coat and turns away to look out the window and thankfully his dad doesn’t say anything else.

He gives up once he gets back to his room. He sinks onto the bed and snivels pathetically before switching Fifa on and getting a beer from the minifridge.

_What time u back_, he texts Mischa. There’s no reply instantly, and Sasch sort of feels bad, because Mischa really has to work to carve out time with Evi and the baby. But he also feels like a petulant child, like the annoying little brother he is, really, just wanting Mischa’s attention.

**Saw the result, back soon**, comes the reply eventually. Part of Sascha wants to reply with _nah don’t worry you stay out w Evi have fun_, but he doesn’t.

_Pls bring Tim Tams_. He couldn’t, he reckons, hack it in Australia. The blistering heat of a Monaco summer is enough for him- to be dealing with that _and_ Christmas dinner would be too much. But if he could import all the obscure varieties of Tim Tams into Europe, he’d probably make a killing.

Mischa does come, when Sascha’s halfway through caning Real Madrid on the Playstation. He pauses the game as Mischa unlocks the door and folds his arms when he drops down beside him on the bed.

“Hey, kiddo.” He ruffles Sascha’s hair and he ducks away with a muttered _scheisse_. Really, of course, he doesn’t mind. When Mischa treats him like he’s still a spindly twelve-year-old he can imagine he _is_, and that he doesn’t have to worry about things like this.

“Was dad being-”

“Yeah.”

Mischa nods.

“Why’s he never as harsh on you as me?”

“Because you’re talented, Sasch. You can go all the way.”

It’s a conversation they’ve had a thousand times, but sometimes Sascha just needs to hear it. _I was too soft on your brother. I spoiled him_, his father says, whenever Sascha brings it up. He says the same to their mother, and she purses her lips and looks as if she’s going to say something but never does. Still, whenever his father changes his diet and Sascha feels overwhelming cravings for some food group or another, it’s always his mother who smuggles contraband into his hotel rooms. It’s _complicated_, OK? People don’t get it. It’s a family thing.

“You wanna play some Fifa?” Mischa says. Sascha doesn’t, really, he just wants to go to bed, but he’s made Mischa come home early from dinner, so he says yes out of guilt.

Eventually, Mischa calls it a night, but he pauses at the door as he leaves.

“You’ll go all the way, Sasch. I know you will. You just gotta trust the process.”

Sascha nods and Mischa leaves. He climbs under the duvet and covers his head. _But what if_. What if he doesn’t make it? And what if it’s the process that means he won’t? He shuts his eyes.

***

The coin toss is one thing. Arms loosely wrapped around shoulders, a flash of a smile for the cameras. The coin toss isn’t real. But the tiny moment after the warmup and before the first point- that’s real.

“See you on the other side,” Sascha mutters in Russian. He always does. Stef doesn’t know if he does with other players. Maybe Medvedev and Khachanov get the same snarl. Maybe other players get it in English. Who knows? Either way, it’s Stef’s enduring image of Sascha. Toned and taut and ready. _See you on the other side_. It’s just a polite way of saying _fuck you_. Stef is serving first, and he tosses and knocks it over, and they’re away.

Stefanos wins in straights and just like that Sascha is out of Rotterdam in the third round. Stef doesn’t see him realise he’s lost, but he watches him walk off court. His shoulders hunch over and his head drops. His feet drag. His bag looks heavy.

“Well done,” his dad calls from the stands. His whole team is cheering and waving. Stef waves back and blows his mum a kiss, but then packs up and only pauses to sign a few autographs for the outstretched hands as he goes.

In the locker room, Sascha is slumped in a chair, knees spread apart, two balled fists between them, head hanging. This is always the worst part. Having to face the person you’ve beat. It’s not as bad, though, as facing the person who’s beat you, and Stef is glad he’s not in Sascha’s position.

“Uh,” he says, to announce his presence. Sascha looks up sharply, like he’s been caught doing something wrong. “Good match.”

“You already said that.” Maybe Sascha meant to snap at him but he just sounds tired. “And it wasn’t a good match.”

“You broke me twice,” Stef argues.

“6-2, 6-3 is _not_ a good match,” and Stef doesn’t have a response to that sort of logic so he shuts up and goes over to his locker. He twists the padlock round to 6-7-0-8 and pulls out his towel and his shampoo.

“Why are you here?” Sascha says suddenly. “And not out there, celebrating? Signing programmes and stuff. Y’know.”

It’s true; normally when Stef wins his opponent is either on his way out of the locker room or has already left. He’s not usually done on court this quickly. He doesn’t have an answer to that, either, so he just shrugs.

“Sorry. I’ll be done soon, if it’s bothering you. I’m first in for the presser.”

“I know,” Sascha says flatly. “It’s not bothering me. It’s just-”

“What the _hell_ was that?” The bellowed Russian arrives before the speaker. Zverev Sr. rounds the corner, the locker room door slamming shut behind him, and charges up to Sascha. Stef watches with a sort of morbid fascination. Sascha seems to curl in on himself. Become smaller. He towers over his father but right now he looks like a terrified child.

“You let that little Greek faggot beat you in straights? Again? What the fuck happened, Alexander?”

“Papa,” Sascha says, quietly.

“Double fault, unforced error, double fault- am I training a man or a donkey, hm?”

“Papa,” Sascha says again, and motions over to Stefanos.

Alexander Sr. turns round and clocks him. Instantly his face changes from thunderous to neutral.

“Stefanos,” he says, in a voice so smooth it turns Stef’s stomach. “I didn’t see you there. I’m so sorry, you mustn’t get the wrong impression. Heat of the moment, yes?”

“Of course, Mr Zverev,” Stef says. “Not at all. I’ll- I’ll get out of your way.” He throws the towel round his shoulder and with a last, unreturned glance at Sascha, goes to the showers.

**_You weren’t supposed to see that_**.

Stef has had Sascha’s number since the Laver Cup. The groupchat is now mostly dead, apart from Roger sending dumb memes and wishing everyone a happy Friday, but it still means that Stef is technically in contact with them all. Roberto sometimes sends him quick _good luck_ texts, because Roberto is a nice guy.

This is the first text from Sascha he’s ever received.

_Your dad shouting?_ He replies, and then regrets it, because what else would it mean?

** _Yeah._ **

** _Don’t get the wrong idea._ **

** _He’s not like that all the time._ **

** _Just when I lose._ **

There’s a catty, cruel part of Stefanos that wants to reply with _Well, he must be like that a lot, then_. He can hear his own father saying it with a conspiratorial laugh.

_OK,_ he puts instead.

**_It’s just if I see stuff in the press about it I’ll know it’s you, so don’t try it_**.

_Wasn’t planning to_.

**_Good_**.

Stef puts his phone down.

“Who was that?” his father says, twirling a bit of pasta round his fork. The players’ canteen is bustling and loud. It stresses Stef out, makes it hard to eat, but they’re booked in on a practice court before he goes to bed, so he needs to eat something, at least.

“No one. Uh. The drug testing people. I have to go piss in a cup tomorrow morning.”

“Language,” his father says, without conviction.

**_Don’t get the wrong idea_**, Sascha texts again.

_Whatever you say_, Stef replies. _It’s none of my business_. He shifts on the hard plastic chair he’s sitting on and shoves his phone into his back pocket.

“We need to discuss your plan for tomorrow. When you last played Paire…”

His dad’s voice fades into the background like the adults in the _Charlie Brown_ films. Stef can never concentrate on more than one thing at once. The front of his mind is taken up entirely with Sascha.

Which is stupid. Because Sascha definitely isn’t thinking about him.

Sascha curls into his plane seat and tries, and fails, to not think about Stefanos. The scene loops in his mind against his will. _Asshole_. Why did he have to come into the locker room early? Why didn’t his dad check the coast was clear before launching into a tirade?

Alexander Sr. is normally careful. He’s always assiduous about only leaving bruises on spots that could be explained away. If the physio asks, he can just laugh deep in his throat and say _Sasch took a few balls to the chest last night_, and Sascha can chime in with _clumsy, huh?_. His father never lets him be in the room alone with the physio. With anyone outside the family, if he can help it.

It’s fine, though. He only does it because he wants Sascha to win, because that’s how you train someone, because he grew up in the Soviet Union and that’s what he knows, because Sascha, frankly brings it on himself. It’s not a _problem_. It’s not real. It’s fine.

It’s fine. Except now it’s not: a secret between two people is a secret, but between three- especially when one of them is Stefanos Tsitsipas- and what if he tells, what if he goes to the press, what if-

“You OK, bud?” Mischa biffs him on the shoulder. “You’ve gone pale.”

“Fine,” Sascha says. “Uh, airsickness.”

“You gonna puke?”

“Nah. Just need to sleep.”

“OK, kiddo. Tell me if you need anything.”

He nods and smiles back. He pulls the window cover down and shuts his eyes, turns away from Mischa and his mother again. Their father is across the aisle. Stefanos is still in Rotterdam. Probably playing by now. Standing where Sasch should be. He lets the rage and sleep overtake him.

They get back to Monaco and the whole family is exhausted, subdued. They climb the stairs to their floor in silence and no one says anything when Sascha slips off to his flat without saying goodnight. An interviewer at Paris last year had asked him when he’d moved out, and he’d explained that they occupied an entire floor of their apartment building, Mischa and Evgeniya and the baby in one apartment, his parents in another, and Sascha in the other, and how they left their doors unlocked and wandered in and out at will. The interviewer had stopped and pulled a funny face and said, “You’re joking, right?”. Sascha had shrugged. “But you’re twenty-two. Mischa’s married, he’s got a child- and you still live with your parents?” _We’re a team, other people don’t get it_.

He collapses face first onto his bed and tries to make up his mind as to whether he wants to cry or jerk off. He could do both, he reasons, he’s an excellent multitasker. He checks his phone.

_Heyyyy_.

He hasn’t saved her number, but he knows who it is anyway. They met at a bar in town. She’d had long, straight, black hair, and she was wearing a little top that dipped down to show her cleavage, and she was pretty. Under the lights. People would think her a catch. He knows next to nothing about her. Her name- Georgia. Where she’s from- Paris (_but my dad’s from Munich, so I can speak German, don’t worry_). That’s about it. They don’t really need much more.

**Hey**, he replies. **Back from Rotterdam**.

_Did you win?_

**No**, he replies, and resists the urge to add _otherwise I wouldn’t be home by now_. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know anything about tennis. Maybe it’s refreshing. Nice to meet someone outside the bubble.

_Aww babe. Should do something to cheer you up_.

They spoke for perhaps twenty minutes, and then she asked if they could swap numbers, and she’s been texting him every few days ever since. It’s been a month, and she still hasn’t, apparently, clocked that she’s always the one starting conversations. Or maybe she just doesn’t care. Sascha won’t deny it’s an ego boost.

**We could go out to dinner**, he puts, because it’s been a _month_, he should either do something about it or put a stop to it altogether.

_Sounds good_, almost instant. _Where?_

He doesn’t know, really. He hasn’t been on a date in Monte Carlo yet, he doesn’t know where the romantic places are. He could ask Mischa where he takes Evi on the rare nights they get to themselves, but that would mean Mischa making a whole big-brother rigmarole about _ooh, little Saschka’s got a daaaaaate, is she pretty, are you going to bring her home, can I hear wedding bells?_ And he only means it in jest, the solemn duty of the irritating older sibling, but Sascha just can’t be bothered. He sends her the address of the restaurant they went to as a family for Christmas last year and hopes it’ll do.

_Looks great_, she shoots back. _When?_

**You free tonight?**

_I can be_, she replies, and well, would you look at that, he’s got a date. Fuck Rotterdam, fuck Stefanos Tsitsipas. Fuck it.

They sit in a corner table of the restaurant. Sascha has pasta, she nibbles at a salad, and they get through a bottle of wine together. He asks her questions and tries his hardest to concentrate on the answer, but she’s even more boring than when he first met her.

“A real estate agent, huh,” he finds himself saying. His media training has never come in more useful.

“But c’mon,” she says eventually. “Tell me about tennis.” They’re having a coffee in lieu of dessert; they have each been given a mint on the saucer as well. The waiter, it would seem, is more optimistic than Sascha.

“Tennis…” he shrugs. “It’s my job, I dunno.”

“You must love it. Gotta love it, to do it for a job.”

He shrugs again. “I love winning.”

“You win a lot?” She’s leaning across the table and putting her hand in between them, the way kids in middle school would to say _it’s OK, you can hold my hand_. He doesn’t.

“Not recently. I’m kind of going through a dry spell.”

“You sound like you could do with some encouragement.”

_OK_, he thinks. _Easier than I was expecting_.

“I’ll drive you home,” he says. They get into his car and she immediately starts fiddling with the buttons on the seat, adjusting the height and the tilt and all that, and as he drives off she starts messing around with the radio. He has it tuned to the local commercial station and as she twiddles the knob it goes out of range and he resists the urge to kiss his teeth and snap at her. She switches it off and sits back, and only speaks to give him directions.

They pull up. It’s one of those huge villas with a private drive and she has to get out to put in a code to open the gate.

“It’s so annoying,” she says, when she gets back in, “I have a remote but it’s in my car. And the doorman’s not here because it’s the weekend.”

“Bummer,” Sascha says, and she clearly doesn’t catch the sarcasm. He switches off the engine and they’re left in the silence, just the _tick-tick-tick_ as it cools.

“So,” she says. There’s something about the light, again, she looks really pretty, and Sascha thinks he could kiss her and her lips would probably feel soft and lovely. So he does, and they do. He reaches up to cup her jaw in his hand. Girls like that, all the times he’s done it. His hands are big and they say it makes them feel safe or something.

“You want to come in?” she says. Not for a coffee, or a nightcap, or all the other excuses girls have used. She’s not fucking around, it would seem.

“Sure, I-” he glances at the clock. “_Scheisse_.”

“What?”

“It’s 11:30.”

“Will this car turn back into a pumpkin, or…” There’s a glint of amusement in her eyes and normally Sascha would find it very attractive, but right now he’s just pissed off.

“I have practice early tomorrow. I can’t stay- uh, I-”

“OK, Cinderella, I’ll make it quick.” She goes back to kissing him, then, and he’s a little confused, but then she’s touching him, running her hand alternately over his stomach and over his crotch. There’s some interest down there, thank God, and she unzips him and kisses down his neck. She leans down, tucks her hair out of the way and takes him in her mouth.

“Fuck,” he spits, but not, he realises, because he’s enjoying it. It’s sort of sloppy and inexpert, really, and her teeth keep getting in the way. He shuts his eyes and wills himself to stay hard because God, he doesn’t need that embarrassment now.

_It’s been a good weekend, right?_

_Golden curls and dark eyebrows. The way his nose scrunched up when he tried the champagne_.

“Fuck!” he says again.

“You like that, huh?” she murmurs.

_Brown eyes. Not dangerous, more like something warm and safe to escape to. His weight on him after match point, the way he’d come running over, how it felt to have him pressed against him and-_

“I’m gonna-”

She pulls away in time and jerks him off then wipes her hand on his jeans. He zips himself up; she scrubs her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I’ll call you,” she grins, and pecks one more kiss on his lips, then gets up and disappears up the path into the house.

He deletes her number from his phone before he drives home.

Stef makes it to the quarter finals, and then Novak beats him, but he drops the first set, so Stef’s happy.

“Good match,” Novak says, clapping him on the back, but he says that to everyone, every match, win or lose, easy or difficult.

“Thanks,” Stef says, and it doesn’t actually hurt as much as he was expecting it to. He wants to win, but he can’t really find it in himself to hate losing.

“Good match,” his father repeats on his way to the locker room. It’s a bit of déjà vu: Djokovic is old enough to be his dad. Nearly.

“Thanks,” Stef says.

“Shower, presser, hotel,” Apostolos says, a familiar mantra.

“See you soon,” Stef replies. He feels very odd, all of a sudden. The déjà vu has set in fully now and it feels like he’s walking through a dream.

His phone pings and he slips into the locker room before checking it. It’s Nick.

_Diaries_, he’s written, which is shorthand for, tell me your schedule for the next month or so, and we’ll work out when we can next get together. Stef never knows how to feel when he gets that, but he always replies, so clearly it can’t be entirely negative.

**_Acapulco, Indian Wells, Miami_**.

_Not Marseille_

** _No_ **

_Shame I like Marseille_

That tracks, Stef thinks. If Nick were any city in France, he’d be Marseille. Which sends him down a rabbit hole of assigning French cities to players on the tour (Roger is Paris, of course, Rafa is Nice, which, he supposes, makes Novak Bordeaux- maybe Murray is Amiens…)

_I’ll be at Acapulco. You know what hotel yet?_

** _I can ask my dad_ **

A series of crying-laughing emojis then, because Nick Kyrgios thinks it’s hilarious that Stef and his dad are so close. This is despite the fact that Nick’s mother comes on tour with him _just_ to wash his socks, and Stef knows this because he once had to hide in an ensuite when she came in at half-seven in the morning.

_OK ask him lol we’ll hook up_

Then, _Sorry about today, saw the score, looks rough_. Stef frowns. Sends a shrug emoji. Gets in the shower and turns the water on way too hot. Nick doesn’t usually send stuff like that, and Stef doesn’t like it when the predictable factors of his life (his backhand, his morning and night routines, the Australian he’s having bad casual sex with) become unpredictable.

He has about two hours of footage sitting on an SD card and he’s been promising himself a good long session of editing since Christmas. He doesn’t realise how long until his phone buzzes itself off the table. He picks up.

“Papa?” he says. He stretches and cracks his knuckles and realises he’s been hunched right over.

“Why aren’t you answering your texts?”

“Sorry, my phone was on do not disturb.”

“Are you in bed?”

“Shit. Uh. What time is it?”

“Language. 10:30.” Stef glances at the clock on his computer. He’d sat down to work with a bowl of microwave noodles at seven, so he’s been working non-stop for three and a half hours. It felt like five minutes. His back aches and his joints are creaking as he unfolds himself from the desk in his hotel room.

“I’m just going now. What time’s the flight tomorrow?”

“8:30.”

“AM? _Fuck_.”

“Language,” Apostolos snaps again. “Get some sleep. Physio on the plane.”

“Mmm. Night-night.”

“Goodnight, Stefanos.”

He’s up and vertical now, and he can feel his eyes itching. But if he spends just another half an hour, he can get the edit done, and then with the wifi on the plane he can have it rendered and uploaded by the following afternoon…

He sits back down, and blinks, and the next time he checks the clock, it’s midnight.

“I’ll never get used to the fucking jetlag, man.”

Nick’s presence in the room is only apparent by his voice. The blinds are drawn and the lights are off. Stefanos stands at the door and squints and eventually makes out a lump under the duvet on the bed. It’s a little after midday in Acapulco and Stefanos only got the text five minutes ago. Not that he’s desperate or anything.

“I don’t think sleeping in the middle of the day is the best solution,” he says. He lets the door shut behind him and he slides under the covers next to Nick.

“Not sleeping, am I, cunt? That’s why you’re here.”

Stef rolls his eyes but allows Nick to straddle him and kiss him.

Afterwards, he turns away to check his phone. Call it fat thumbs or his subconscious, but he ends up opening his text thread with Sascha.

**_Don’t get the wrong idea_**.

“Hey, Nick?”

“Hmm?” He’d collapsed as soon as he was done, dozing off almost immediately, leaving Stef to sort himself out. Selfish prick.

“Do you…” he trails off and turns off his phone. “Never mind.”

“What?”

Stef turns over and buries himself in Nick’s chest in a way he hopes will be winsome and distracting.

“What, Steffi?”

“It’s just. Do you think it’s normal for a coach to yell at a player when they lose?”

Nick makes a ‘dunno’ kind of grunt. “I guess it depends. Y’know, on the score. How many racquets they smashed. Goran’s always yelling at me.”

“Would it be different if your coach was your dad?”

Nick shifts under him. “Do I need to punch Apostolos for you?”

“No,” Stef says, and manages a laugh. “It’s- never mind. Forget I said anything.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Trust me.”

“All right.”

“I’m gonna go. I have practice.”

“K,” Nick replies, and Stef goes to say something more, but he sits up and finds Nick is already snoring softly.

***

Indian Wells is hot and sticky.

“Climate change,” Dominic intones while he and Sascha and a bunch of other guys are packed in a minivan to shuttle them from one end of the city to the other. “It’s all because of climate change. Average spring temperatures in California have been…”

Sascha lets Domi’s soft voice wash over him. It’s like white noise. Not that he’d ever tell Domi that. He’s got good at making _mmhmm_ grunts at appropriate times so Domi thinks he’s listening.

Domi’s had sex with men, Sascha thinks suddenly. Not too many, not enough to make it worth telling the press about. It’s not like he’s out at pride parades with a blue and purple flag. But one night when they were younger and they were drunk and they were playing truth or dare Domi said it, _yeah, a couple of times_, and Sascha had been wondering ever since why-

Why it should matter, why it should stick with him. It’s not like he’s attracted to Domi. Particularly. He has a nice body, but he’s not Sascha’s type.

Because he’s a man, Sascha reminds himself, and men aren’t his type, because he’s straight. He likes girls. It doesn’t matter. He needs a drink of water, to open the window of this fucking van-

“Hey, you OK?”

Domi’s hand on his arm is too warm and heavy.

“Uh,” he says. His head is swimming. He’s too hot. It’s too much.

“Pull over,” Domi barks at the driver, and then Sascha has his head between his knees and is throwing up on the side of the highway.

“Hey, kiddo.”

Mischa closes the door of Sascha’s hotel room very gently behind him, but then he sits down on the bed and the change in the weight makes Sascha want to hurl again.

“What are you, the cavalry?” he mutters.

“Dad sent me,” Mischa admits. “Thinks I can talk some sense into you.”

“You’re both wasting your breath. I’m playing tomorrow.”

“Sascha-”

“I’m playing,” he says through gritted teeth. He has the draw sheet memorised, the potential ways his run could go, if he just wins this round, if he can just get to the quarter finals, if…

“You’re being ridiculous,” Mischa says, and his voice has that hard edge that he got from their father. “You can’t even sit up. You can’t play tomorrow.”

“I have heatstroke,” Sascha insists. “If I take a nap, stay out of the sun, drink lots of water, I’ll be fine for tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Mischa repeats. But they’re as stubborn as each other and Mischa knows him all too well. He doesn’t push, just gets up and goes. Sascha kinds of wishes he would stay and keep him company but also can’t stand the sight of him when he sounds this much like Alexander.

Sascha burrows under the sheets and wills his head to stop pounding.

When he throws up at the umpire’s feet and unceremoniously keels over two sets into his match the following afternoon, the thought that flashes through his mind before the abyss descends is championship point at the Laver Cup.

Which makes Stefanos Tsitsipas turning up at his hotel room door very fitting.

“Can I come in?”

“Hnn,” Sascha grunts, which is shorthand for, _the door’s open, I’m supine in bed, it’s not like I can stop you_.

“It’s me,” Stefanos says, uselessly. The lights are off and the curtains are drawn and Sascha’s pretty sure the room smells of sick and sweat, but still Stef approaches and stands at the foot of Sascha’s bed like a nurse on rounds.

“Thought you were playing today,” Sascha says. The draw sheet said _Court 1, Zverev A vs Sinner J_, followed by _Tsitsipas S vs Goffin D_, which that morning had meant only good things: Sascha would beat Jannik and Stef would beat David and then Sascha would beat Stef in the quarters and all would be well with the world.

“I played,” Stef says. “I mean, my match finished already. You, uh. Freed up the court.”

“So you and Jannik in the quarters, then.”

“Nah,” Stef says. In the gloom Sasch can just about make out his figure shifting, as if nervously, on the balls of his feet. “David took it to three and he got me on a tiebreak.”

“Sucks,” Sascha says, “I had ten euros on you.”

“You did?”

“No, you idiot, it’s a joke.”

“Oh.”

Sascha feels bad, weirdly. Like it’s _his_ fault Stef doesn’t understand what is _obviously_ a joke.

“So you’re not here to gloat.”

“No,” Stef says, and even sounds a little hurt. “I was checking you were OK.”

“Why?” This conversation is making Sascha’s head throb, which is the last thing he needs.

“I was watching. Your match, I mean, from the physio room. And it looked pretty bad. You look ill.”

“I _am _ill.”

“Well, then. I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

“I threw up and fainted on live TV and now I’m lying in bed with the flu.” _And some Greek prick’s come in to see the invalid_, he wants to add, but doesn’t.

“You and Novak,” Stef says.

“Huh?”

“Throwing up on TV. You’ve got that in common with Novak.”

Which makes him feel a little better, but he’s not going to admit that any time soon.

“Right.”

“Anyway. My mama made some biscuits, they should help your stomach.”

“What?”

He is aware of Stef climbing onto the bed by the lurch in his stomach. He turns his head painfully and sees, eyes adjusting, a mane of curly blond hair over him, Stef kneeling by his side. He’s carrying a tupperware box. An honest-to-god tupperware box.

“They’ve got ginger in them,” Stef says. “Mama always makes them when I’m ill.”

Sascha says nothing, but he must look suspicious, because Stef goes on. “It’s a Russian recipe. Your mama probably makes something similar. Try one?”

_It’s a Russian recipe_, he tells himself, and takes the biscuit Stef is holding out. A tentative bite and something warm and spicy fills his mouth. He swallows and pauses, but his stomach isn’t churning. He takes another bite, and another, and he finds himself being watched in silence by Stef as he finishes off the whole biscuit.

“Thanks,” he says, reluctantly. “I haven’t really eaten anything since yesterday.”

“Good,” Stefanos says, and he sounds, the absolute motherfucker, genuinely happy that Sascha has eaten something. “Now wait there.”

“It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” Sascha calls after him. He can hear Stef disappear into the toilet, and the tap running. Then a cool, damp cloth laid across his forehead, and oh _god_, it’s wonderful.

“That’s…thank you.” He sighs it. It really is the best sensation he’s felt in a long time. Pure relief. His headache dissipates almost immediately.

“Cold flannel and mama’s biscuits,” Stef says, like it’s a prescription recommended by the World Health Organisation.

“Tell Julia thank you.”

“I will.”

There’s another dip in the mattress and Sascha realises, eyes still closed, that Stefanos has laid down next to him.

“Why did you play today?” he says softly. “You were ill yesterday. Dominic told me.”

_I’m gonna kill that guy when I next see him_. “I wanted to. I felt better this morning.”

“Is it because of Melbourne? And Qatar. And Rotter-”

“Yeah, thanks, I don’t need the reminder. And no. It’s not like I need to _prove_ anything.”

“I never said-”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to.” Sascha opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling. It’s a sort of murky grey in this light. He remembers Stefanos’s eyes, their rich colour, and a part of him wants to turn and look, but- he can’t. Obviously. “Why are you here?” he says instead.

“I told you. I wanted to make sure you’re OK. We’re friends.”

Sascha snorts.

“Fine. We’re colleagues. Can I not be concerned for you without an ulterior motive?”

_Ulterior motive_. He’s even pretentious in Russian, it would seem. But Sascha says nothing, just shuts his eyes again. Stef moves a little closer, and then a little closer, and then he’s sort of wrapped himself around Sascha in a weird sideways hug. And, OK, it’s not the most comfortable position he’s ever been in, but Sascha won’t deny having a long warm body pressed up against his, and the knowledge that someone cares enough about him to come up to his room with biscuits, are very comforting sensations. He can feel the nausea subsiding now. He sighs, contented.

It’s a long moment later that Stef withdraws.

“I’ll leave the cookies here. Finish them. And drink lots of water.”

“Yes, mum,” Sascha replies, without menace. The door clicks shut behind him as quietly as when he came in, and then Sascha is alone. Finally, he sinks into a dreamless sleep.

Stefanos flies out that evening. They sit as a family in the business class section of the plane and he and his mother play cards while his father looks out the window.

“Will Elisavet be up when we get in? I want to give her the snow globe I bought.”

“It’ll be past her bedtime,” Apostolos says, not looking up.

“You can wake her,” his mother says. “It’s not a school night. She misses you something rotten.”

“I miss her too,” Stef says. It’s a dull ache when he’s not around his siblings. Like when he was seventeen and his wisdom teeth came through and the pain was all he could think about.

“You’re back on clay tomorrow, first thing. Patrick’s been going over some new drills with me.” His father looks round for that.

“_Lapochka_,” his mother says, exasperated. “He’s just finished a tournament. Let him rest, hm?”

Which starts a not-quite-argument about how ready Stef is for Roland Garros that he isn’t privy to. He tidies away the cards and sticks his earphones in and turns Daft Punk up way too loud and shuts his eyes.

Dr Lagarde’s table is high enough that even Sascha’s feet don’t touch the floor when he sits up on it. He dangles them and waves them back and forth like he’s a little kid. Around him, Dr Lagarde and the nurse prod and poke. He has his temperature taken and a cold stethoscope is placed on his back as he is told to cough. He’s already peed in a cup and had a throat swab done. His father sits in the corner of the surgery room, arms folded, stony-faced.

“Well,” Dr Lagarde says, “We’ll wait for the results on all those tests, Mr Zverev.” She is addressing his father. She calls him Sascha, and Sascha’s pretty sure if he asked she’d give him a lollipop on his way out. “But I really do think it’s just a bad case of the flu.”

“Impossible,” his father barks. His English is patchy at the best of times, but when he’s angry, he sounds even more Russian than Sascha thought possible. “Is much more sick than flu.”

“Papa, will you just listen to her?” Sascha says in quiet, quick Russian.

“Like I told you, I think Sascha has been working a little too hard recently. It’s probably affected his immune system. With the diabetes as well, it’s really no surprise he’s been this ill.”

His father frowns at him and Sascha translates. He wishes Mischa were here. He really feels like shit, and having to think in two languages is exhausting.

“So you suggest what?” his father says.

“Well, he’s definitely not going to be able to play Roland Garros. Honestly, I would really say he shouldn’t be playing any tournaments for the rest of the summer. He needs proper recovery time.”

“You think no play until New York?” Alexander scratches his elbow and frowns.

“Being fit and well for the US Open would be a good goal. But you need to be prepared for Sascha being out for the rest of the season.”

“You play New York,” his father says to him, as if Dr Lagarde hadn’t spoken.

“New York,” Sascha repeats. September seems so far away. All that time to _sleep_.

That night, still feverish and far too hot in the Monte Carlo spring, he sleeps fitfully and slides in and out of dreams.

Always the same, of course. He’s hiding in the airing cupboard at the big draughty townhouse in Hamburg he lived in when he was little. He’s as small as he was then, too. Soft platinum blond hair and skinny as a rake. And something’s coming. A bear. He knows it’s a bear. Huge and towering and hungry. The smell of it, hot and angry, of raw meat and something dead. Coming closer, coming closer. The door of the cupboard won’t hold it back. It’s just wood. The bear has two huge paws and snarling teeth. And it’s calling his name. _Sascha. Sascha, I’m coming. You can’t hide from me, boy. I’ll find you. I always find you_. Eyes screwed shut, foetal position, wait for the inevitable.

He wakes up drenched in sweat. The morning brings blustery showers but he just feels gross. He hauls himself out of bed to make breakfast and feed the dog. Lövik hops happily at his feet and yaps when the bowl of food is placed before him. Normally, it would be enough to cure any of Sascha’s bad moods, but that morning he feels like he’s stuffed with wool.

**U up?** He texts Mischa.

_Yeah_, comes the reply, quick as a flash, _it’s 10:30_.

Sascha rolls his eyes. **Not all of us have a toddler.**

_Some of us _are_ still toddlers_.

He could send back something cutting about Mischa being a boring old man, about how he’s turning into their dad, but he doesn’t feel like it.

**What u doing today**, he sends instead.

_About to take jr to the park. Wanna come?_

Mischa, Sascha considers, as he pulls on the nearest clean clothes he can find and heads out the door, knows him better than he knows himself.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Evi says when she opens the door.

“Great, thanks, Evgeniya, how are you?”

She rolls her eyes but stands back.

“Ignore him, honey,” Mischa calls from the kitchen. “He’s on the rag.”

Sascha follows the sound of his voice and goes for the fridge.

“There’s nothing in here,” he complains. Mischa is at the kitchen table, half-reading some very boring-looking mail, half-posting spoonfuls of something orange and mushy into Junior’s mouth.

“You have your own fridge,” Mischa points out. It’s an argument as old as any other but today Sascha is comforted by the familiar back-and-forth.

“There’s nothing in there, either.” He takes a can of diet Dr Pepper and cracks it open, then swings round to sit at the table.

“Evi’s right, you should be in bed.”

“_Meesh_,” Sascha groans. “You sound like dad.”

“Dad’s right,” Mischa replies. “You’re ill.”

“I won’t get better staying at home doing sweet fuck all.”

“Don’t swear in front of the baby,” Mischa says, and feeds Junior another spoonful.

“I’ll come to the park, push Junior on the swings. It’s not exactly strenuous exercise.”

Mischa looks doubtful but says nothing, and Sascha sits back and waits for Junior to finish his breakfast.

Marcelo calls him just as he’s really getting into pushing Junior on the swings. They had a nice rhythm going. He glances over at the bench where Mischa and Evi are perched, but they’re not looking, so he answers.

“Small Zverev,” Marcelo says, instead of hello. It’s his idea of a joke. He finds it hilarious, still, that Sascha is taller than Mischa but also ten years younger than him.

“’Sup, man.” Junior coos from his swing seat.

“You are with the baby?”

“Yeah. Out at the playpark with his favourite uncle.”

“Put him on, I say hello.”

Sascha dutifully holds the phone up to Junior’s face, and he and Marcelo have a very thorough chat in baby-talk and Portuguese.

“I miss you all. Miss the Zverevs.” Marcelo says, “I come to Monte Carlo. Soon. Or you come to Brazil.”

Sascha _hmms_. Rio sounds nice.

“What’s up, man, why are you calling?”

“Oh, yeah,” Marcelo exclaims, as if the excitement of talking to a toddler made him entirely forget what he was going to say. “I don’t see you on the draw sheet for Roland Garros.”

“I’m not playing.” He swaps hands and stops pushing the baby and leans on the frame of the swing set like that might make this conversation easier.

“Sorry?” Marcelo says.

“I’m not playing Roland Garros this year. Uh. I’m not playing until the US Open, actually.”

There is a very long pause on the end of the line, which is eery, because Marcelo is usually impossible to shut up.

“You are not playing,” he says at last, “Until New York?”

“Yeah. That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“Is because you puke on umpire? ATP have banned you?”

Sascha would laugh, normally, but this isn’t normal.

“No, I. I’m ill. Doctor’s orders, y’know.”

“How ill?”

Sascha sighs through his nose. “Dunno. It’s just the flu, apparently, but Dr Lagarde said-”

“And Papa Zverev agrees?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Another long pause. “You gonna announce it, do a press release?”

“Guess so,” Sascha says, “That’s a management thing, though, I don’t get involved with that.”

“OK.” Marcelo sounds odd. “OK. You are, you know. OK, and stuff?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. It’s a nice little vacation, right? More time at home. With the dog and Junior and stuff.”

“Right.”

“Right.” Sascha swallows.

“You call me, yeah? If is not OK.”

“Yeah, man, I will.”

“I worry about you, Small Zverev. Skinny ass.”

“Giraffe. I’ll see you, OK?”

“OK.”

He wakes up the next morning at 7:30, despite not having set an alarm. He checks the clock and groans and rolls over. There’s an ache in his chest and he thinks at first it’s heartburn but then he realises, he misses it. Already. After not even a week off, he misses his routine of going down to the practice courts and doing drills, of sweating and tiring himself out, of _working hard_. He feels useless, a big bag of bones with some flesh hanging off it. There’s not much point being a tennis player if you don’t play tennis.

His father doesn’t accompany him to the check-up that comes a month later. It’s a weird sense of déjà vu, sitting there, talking to Dr Lagarde. It doesn’t even feel like a month has passed. Time has gone weird, days slipping past him without his noticing it. Maybe it’s a Wednesday, maybe it’s a Sunday. He doesn’t know. Or really care.

“Well,” Dr Lagarde says. “Your chest sounds a lot better.” She puts her stethoscope back round her neck and sits down behind her desk. She hammers away at the keyboard and inputs something on the computer. “You can put your shirt back on and come and sit down,” she says after a moment.

“Oh,” Sascha says, and blushes beetroot, because Dr Lagarde is one of those really sexy older French women who sort of scare him.

“I think you’re ready to slowly increase your physical activity. Start with some light cardio and flexibility work, and then you can move up to more strenuous stuff over the summer.”

“Do you think I might be ready for Wimbledon?” Sascha says hopefully. She purses her lips and smiles at him like he’s a child.

“No, I think the US Open should still be your goal. Too much too early will only send you back to square one.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Why? Do you want to play Wimbledon?”

“I’m a tennis player,” he says, “Of course I want to play Wimbledon.”

She blinks.

“Sorry,” he says. “I just mean- it’s weird, you know? It’s been a weird month. Not playing tennis. It’s been my whole life for twenty-three years, and now it’s just- stopped.”

“How’s your mental health?” she says.

“I’m not seeing a shrink, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I don’t think you need to, but I think it’s interesting that you’re dismissing it out of hand.”

Sascha snorts and crosses his arms. “I’m fine. Trust me.”

“If you say so,” Dr Lagarde says, and that only pisses him off more, but he manages to bite his tongue. “It can be hard, especially for men, to talk about it when things are tough. But if tennis has been all you’ve thought about all your life, and now, suddenly, you can’t do it any more, I can imagine anyone in your situation would find it difficult.”

“I can manage,” Sascha says. Dr Lagarde doesn’t reply, just purses her lips again, and moves on to asking him about his diabetes management.

He gets two phone calls that night. The first comes during dinner, which he eats alone in his kitchen. If he goes to Mischa’s then Mischa will invite their parents over, and then he’ll have to face his father’s questions about the check-up, and he would rather put that off for as long as he can. He shovels a mouthful of disappointing pesto pasta into his mouth just as his phone buzzes itself off the table.

“Fuck,” he mutters, then repeats himself when he sees who it is that’s calling. “Roger,” he says. “What’s up, man?”

“Hey,” says Roger on the other end, that familiar, gentle voice. Sascha’s finally over the novelty of having Roger _actual_ Federer in his contacts, but it still spins him out that they’re friends, that Roger calls him up and gives him advice and buys him pints after tournaments.

“The press release should be going out this evening. Tony told me about…”

“Yeah,” Sascha says. “Uh.” _I have the flu and my season’s gone to shit and I’m stuck at home until September_ sounds like whining.

“Are you doing OK?” Roger says.

“Yeah, I am. Y’know. Just recovering.”

“Well, we miss you on tour. You know, I’ll have to have Isner on my team for the pickup game. Rafa already called dibs on Delpo, now he’s back.”

“A fate worse than death,” Sascha deadpans. “I’ll be back for New York. We can kick Rafa’s ass then.”

“You’re on. Oh, talk of the devil. Raf, it’s Sascha!”

There is the sound of a phone changing hands and then Rafa’s bright, happy voice, apparently muffled by a mouthful of food.

“Sascha! We miss you, when you coming back?”

“Soon,” Sascha promises. “Miss you too, man. Miss you both.”

“You get better, OK? Is not the same without you.”

“Yeah, I will,” Sascha says. He hangs up and puts his fork down, and before he can stop it tears spring to his eyes. He wonders why, because it isn’t Roger and Rafa’s concern- or it isn’t _just_ that. He stayed with them once, in the villa in Porto Cristo, so he could do some press stuff for Rafa’s academy. It was only a few days, and he’d tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, but their loving, cosy domesticity was everywhere. Rafa cooking dinner for them, and chasing Roger out of the kitchen with a tea towel when he would try to help. Or the two of them lying across each other on the sofa in front of the TV. Or the morning of the press shoot, when Sascha got up before them both, and watched them come down to breakfast together, still sleepy, hand-in-hand, like they couldn’t bear to not be touching even for a second.

And there Sascha is, alone in his apartment, eating shit pasta.

The second call makes him jump. He is shocked out of his reverie by his phone buzzing. He manages to catch it before it falls off again, and doesn’t check the caller before picking up.

“Hello?”

“Sascha?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Stefanos,” says Stefanos, in Russian.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Hi.”

A silence so long it feels like empires rise and fall before Stefanos speaks again.

“You’re not playing Roland Garros.”

Sascha wants to slam his head against the kitchen counter, but Dr Lagarde probably wouldn’t approve.

“No. I’m not playing until New York. I take it you saw the press release?”

“Actually, Roger told me.”

“Why?”

“I asked.”

Sascha sighs. “And why did you ask?”

“Because I didn’t see your name on the draw sheet. Why aren’t you-”

“Doctor’s orders.” He feels the sudden urge to not be stationary so he gets up and goes out onto his balcony. In the distance, over the rooftops, is the sea, a glittering grey thing under the danger-red sky.

“I’m sorry,” Stef says. “You must be upset.”

“Of course I’m fucking upset,” Sascha snaps. “But I don’t need your pity.”

“And I wasn’t offering it,” Stef returns, just as quick, but his voice as even as ever. “I was just calling to-”

“Check if I’m OK, yeah, I know, you’re like, the three hundredth person who’s called. You should just get one of those big cards and make everyone on the tour sign it.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, you know. Maybe not Rosol.”

“I don’t think that umpire you called a fucking moron is going to have much sympathy either.”

“Yeah, I think Manuel Messina’s doing a victory dance as we speak.”

Stefanos laughs and the sound of it makes Sascha want to laugh too. Not because it was funny, but because the sound of Stef’s laughter is like holding onto a helium balloon. It’s a disconcerting sensation. He keeps quiet. Rubs pensively at a loose bit of granite on the balcony with his thumb.

“I’m just saying, though. You must be bored as shit, stuck inside. Are you practising?”

Sascha hesitates before answering. “I will be. I’m working up to it.”

“So right now you’re just sitting around with nothing to do? Fuck, that’s bad.” For some reason, Stef swearing in Russian sounds even dirtier than when he does in English. Russian sounds dirtier in general, though. It’s odd to hear the rough consonants coming from Stefanos, who in Greek and English always sounds so thoughtful and articulate.

“It’s fine,” Sascha says defensively. “I’m OK.”

“You got a series on the go?”

“I just finished _Arrested Development_.”

“Late to the party.”

Sascha shrugs before realising Stef won’t be able to see him. “I’ve been busy, I guess. Took me forever to get through _Stranger Things_.”

“On the off-season I always rewatch _Gilmore Girls_ all the way through,” Stef says pensively.

“You watch what?”

“_Gilmore Girls_. You haven’t seen it?”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

On the other end Stef splutters. “You’ve never heard of _Gilmore Girls_?”

“No, sorry.”

“OK, open your laptop _right now_.”

“All right, if you rec-”

“Right now,” Stef insists, and for some reason Sascha obeys. He goes back in and gets his laptop from his bed, rescuing it from where Lövik is asleep on it.

“OK,” Stef says, having apparently heard the chime from the Mac as it powers up. “Now open Netflix.”

Sascha does so, and puts _Gilmore Girls_ into the search bar.

“I’m looking at two women.”

“Right. The older one is Lorelai, and then that’s her daughter Rory.”

“Her _daughter_?”

“She had her when she was sixteen, and then she ran away from- look, just watch it, OK?”

“It looks like kind of a girly show,” Sascha says.

Stef sighs dramatically. “Well, ration it, because if you watch too many episodes in a row, there is a chance you’ll grow boobs.”

“You’re taking the piss out of me,” Sascha marvels.

“Only a bit. Listen, it always cheers me up. You need something new to watch, this is my best recommendation.”

“OK,” Sascha says, still doubtful. “I’ll watch one episode. If I hate it, you owe me money.”

“If you hate it, I’ll give you the first set the next time we play each other. How about that?”

“Sounds like a deal,” Sascha says, and when he hangs up and presses play on the first episode, it takes him a full twenty minutes to realise what exactly just happened.

**OK so**.

It’s three in the morning. Stef should be asleep.

He is very much not asleep. Roland Garros starts tomorrow (or, Stef supposes, today), and grand slams make him feel the same way Christmas does. Sleep is almost impossible.

It would seem Sascha isn’t asleep either, but then again, he doesn’t have a grand slam to play.

Stef pulls his phone closer to him; the charger cable pops out and he rolls over onto his other side to squint at the screen.

**I watched the first episode**.

Stef grins and feels his face go hot.

_What do you think?_

**I have questions. **

It says _typing_ for a long time, and Stef doesn’t want to seem desperate, like he’s up in the middle of the night waiting for a text from Sascha, so he goes on Twitter and scrolls through it unseeing.

  1. ** Did Lorelai not check how much Rory’s school fees would be before they applied**
  2. ** Luke and Lorelai are going to fuck right???**
  3. ** Pleeeeaaaaase tell me the tall ugly guy isn’t Rory’s love interest**
  4. ** How do you get Rory from Lorelai???**

Stef has to turn onto his back and stare at the ceiling for a long time. The fan is on in his hotel room and he lets its steady hum fill his ears.

_To answer your questions:_

  1. _ Apparently not_
  2. _ Yeah but not for another four seasons_
  3. _ Yeah :/_
  4. _ Idk_

And then he adds, _you enjoyed Gilmore Girls_, and hopes the sarcastic, mocking tone comes through.

**I didn’t hate Gilmore Girls**, Sascha shoots back immediately, **And if you tell anyone I’ll kill you**.

_At least I don’t owe you a set_.

He gets a middle finger emoji for that, and he reckons it’s deserved.

The next morning, Sascha is yawning so hard he almost falls off the exercise bike.

“Concentrate,” his father barks from where he is stood at the entrance to the gym.

From the next bike along, Mischa pokes him in the side.

“You OK, kiddo?” he says in a low voice.

“Yeah, fine,” Sascha says.

“If you’re feeling sick, tell dad. There’s no point in pushing too hard too fast. Like what Dr Lagarde said…”

“I’m fine, honest. I just stayed up too late last night.”

“Ah,” Mischa says. “Doing what?”

“Texting,” Sascha replies without thinking.

“Oh yeah?” Mischa says archly. “Texting who?”

“No one,” Sascha mutters.

“Was it that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl you went out with after Rotterdam.”

Sascha looks and frowns. “How do you-”

“I was up with Junior and I saw you coming in late, and you were dressed up all fancy, but you didn’t talk about it the next morning, so it must have been a date.”

Sascha scowls. “Fuck off, Sherlock Holmes.”

“So, was it her? Are you seeing her again?”

“No,” Sascha says. “We didn’t…there wasn’t a spark.”

“Well, you know ten minutes into the first date whether there’s anything happening,” Mischa says, which gets him onto his first date with Evi and how perfect that was, and Sascha’s happy to tune that out after the fifty billionth recital. At least he’s not still asking about Sascha’s mystery texter.

Sascha doesn’t text Stefanos again until he’s knocked out of Roland Garros.

**Tough match**, he sends, because it was, five arduous sets against Medvedev during a high wind that obscured the cameras on Sascha’s stream. **Still, QF, not bad**.

_I’m happy_, Stef replies a few hours later, once Sascha’s returned from being fed lasagne at Mischa’s place and being interrogated about his workout by his father.

**I finished season 1**, he puts, then erases it, then types it out again, and his thumb hovers over the send button for a long moment before he eventually taps it and puts his phone down.

It _ping_s a few minutes later.

_What do you think!!!!!!!!!!!!_

Then,

_Tell me everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I keep trying to get Petros to watch but he always falls asleep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

Which is how, quite without meaning to, Sascha finds himself texting Stefanos almost every day for the entire summer. He never lets the conversation veer too far from TV or the weather or Stef’s latest match, and he never once lets his family know what’s going on (they think he has a girlfriend, and he lets them think that, and deflects all their questions). But over the course of several months he finds he’s texting Stef more than anyone else in his phone book. More than Domi, who sends him articles about deforestation and beautiful shots of the Austrian countryside. More than Roger and Rafa, who about once a week will text to say they’re thinking of him and miss him on the tour, because they’re nice like that. More even than Marcelo, who keeps asking him when he’s coming back and doesn’t seem to understand how painful it is to not know.

Stef, he realises, is becoming not just a friend, but one of his closest friends, and he comes to look forward to checking his phone in the morning. The horror mounts at the back of his mind and he tries not to think about it, which is how he’s coped with things that scare him since he was little.

Meanwhile, what he is calling his capital-r Recovery is still going on, and he is still being prodded and interrogated by Dr Lagarde, still peeing in a cup for her, and his father is still watching him in the gym every day with a steely gaze. In May he goes back on the tennis court for the first time in two months, but the weight of a racquet in his hand and the hollow _thock_ of a ball connecting with the strings feels like no time has passed at all. His body falls into the same patterns as it ever did, the muscles building themselves back up in the same ways, and he finds that he is just as good a player as he was before.

“You should be ready for New York,” his father mutters one day in June, which is the closest to praise he will ever get. The summer grows long and dry, he and Mischa take trips to Nice and Cannes and Sanremo in between practice and tournaments, and he finishes _Gilmore Girls_ and starts on _QI_, a weird British show where people talk about nothing in particular, also on Stef’s recommendation.

All is going well, then, until the last week of August.

The night is hot and sultry and Sascha eats a plate of spaghetti out on the balcony, watching the sun set and the streets below fall into darkness. His phone _ping_s and it’s Stefanos.

_All set for New York?_

**P much**

_When you lose I’ll buy you a drink_

**‘When’**

😜😜😜

He turns his phone off. The little digital click seems loud against his empty flat and he shoves it in his pocket as he walks back in. Lövik raises his head as Sascha passes but goes back to sleep.

He goes into his room. Shuts the door. Opens his laptop. He puts his phone on silent and tosses it to the other end of the bed, then shoves his sweatpants down a bit and frees his already half-hard cock. With one hand he opens an incognito tab and goes straight to his usual site, already working himself slowly, twisting round slightly at the top, using precum as lube.

It’s a routine he’s had since he was thirteen; he barely needs to think any more. The man in the video is tall, Latino, hairy. Pushes the girl against a wall. Lifts her up; she wraps her legs round his waist. He drops her onto the bed. His bicep flexes.

Unbidden, the thought of Roger enters his mind. Walking around in a towel at the Laver Cup. His chest thick with dark hair, still damp, curled inwards, pointing down. A blurt of precum drips onto his hand.

Rafa’s biceps contracting and expanding as another cross-court forehand hits its mark. Rafa’s arm snaking round Roger’s waist. What they do at night, what noises they make, does Rafa grunt in bed like he does on court-

There’s a link at the bottom to the site’s gay counterpart and Sascha doesn’t take his hand off his cock to click it. He types in _hairy muscle fuck_ which is pretty much the entirety of his thoughts at that moment. He clicks on the first video he finds, watches as without ceremony a guy- who looks enough like Roger that if Sascha took his glasses off he could pretend- pounds into a tiny skinny guy, and the noises and the sweat and the thought, a man, a man with his arms round another man, Sascha with his arms round another man-

When he comes it is a jolt and he moans from the base of his chest. Cum runs down his hand in thick spurts. He feels, for the first time in a long time, done, spent, satiated. He slams the lid of his laptop shut and climbs under the covers and falls asleep immediately, because that’s simpler and easier than thinking about what the actual sanctified _fuck_ just happened.

When he wakes it is with a thick head and a dry mouth. Which isn’t fair, he thinks, because he hasn’t had a drop to drink in months. He hauls himself out of bed and feeds the dog and then feeds himself, and all through breakfast he thinks he’ll be more than capable of moving on, of chalking it up to stress or something, but he goes into his room for his laptop to answer an email, and there the video is, replaying on a loop. His dick clearly hasn’t got the memo because it twitches in immediate interest. Sascha closes the tab then turns his laptop off altogether then runs to the bathroom to throw cold water on his face because _nonononono _this can’t be happening not here not now not to him.

The first time his father hit him Sascha was fourteen.

It was a tournament in France and he’d lost in the second round and he’d thrown his racquet against the net post again and again until it was just a pile of bits of carbon fibre. His father had yanked him out of the boys’ locker room and bundled him into the car and driven back to the hotel in a silence so thunderous Sascha felt barely able to breathe.

Back in their suite Alexander pushed him into a tall lamp and Sascha went over with it. He scrabbled away into a corner but his father followed him, loomed over him, his hulking figure seeming to blot out the sun.

“Papa, I’m sorry,” he’d said, almost chanted, hoped if he said it enough his father would hear, but he was easily drowned out by Alexander’s bellowed Russian, some of it in an accent so thick Sascha couldn’t even understand.

His father dragged him upright by the collar and punched him and punched him and punched him, until his fist connected with Sascha’s stomach and he knocked all the air out of his lungs and Sascha went down like he’d fainted, collapsed on the floor, gasped and wheezed, head spinning, feeling like a cartoon character with a garland of stars and tweeting birds. Only then did his father retreat, taking two steps back and letting his hands fall by his sides.

“My boy,” he breathed, “My boy, my Saschka, my littlest one-” and he’d swooped down then and Sascha’s blood turned cold, his whole body tensed up for round two, but instead his father took his tiny, skinny, teenage frame into his arms and cradled him and held him tight.

“My boy, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, please, you have to believe me, I lost control, I never meant to, I never wanted to hurt you, please, forgive me, please.”

All this over Sascha’s “Papa, I’m sorry, papa, I’m sorry,” which he realised now he hadn’t stopped even when Alexander did, and their voices mingled until Sascha’s simply gave way to tears.

“You have to be a man, Sascha,” his father had said, later, long after it was over. “You have to be a man and think about what’s best. You know you’ll only upset mama if you tell her. And Mischa. You have to promise me this stays between us, my stupid mistake. OK? Can you be a man for me?”

Sascha had nodded. “I can. I promise. I’m sorry, papa.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK.” Hugged him again, strong, meaty fingers in his platinum blond hair. “I won’t ever hurt you, Sascha, I promise you.”

Promises, Sascha has found, don’t mean an awful lot.

_Be a man_.

_You’re playing like a girl_.

_You’re really going to let that little faggot beat you?_

_I don’t have a problem with dykes, really, I just don’t see why they should need to get married_.

_It’s not natural, those two_. _You shouldn’t spend so much time with Federer and Nadal_. _It’s just not right_.

_Be a man, Sascha_.

He scrolls through his recent chats on Whatsapp.

Domi has experience, he figures, and Marcelo is his closest friend, sort of even if their conversations rarely go deeper than football and food, and Roger or Rafa would be the obvious choice.

He pulls on his coat and his least gross trainers and goes to Mischa’s apartment.

Evgeniya answers with Junior on her hip, cooing and sucking his fingers.

“Hey, Sasch,” she says, brightly.

“Hey,” he replies. “Is Mischa in? I need to talk to him.”

“Oh, sorry, darling, he’s at practice.” He can hear a kids’ TV show blaring in the living room behind her.

“Never mind,” he says, “I’ll catch him later.”

“Do you want me to tell him you called round?”

“No, uh. It’s fine. See ya.”

“Bye, Sasch,” Evi says, as lightly as ever, and the door clicks shut.

He sits out on the balcony and watches Mischa come in from practice half an hour later, and goes for a nap.

***

New York always makes Stefanos feel about ten percent more alive, like all his senses are heightened and he can see and feel and smell more keenly. Elisavet knocks on the door of his suite- he’s old and important enough that he gets one on his own now- a few hours after they all arrive.

“I’m bored,” she announces.

“We’ve only just got here,” he says, but he’s bored, too, and gives her an indulgent grin.

“Mama’s asleep, Pavlos is playing _Mario Kart_ and he won’t let me join in, and papa and Petros are down on the practice court.”

“So nice to be your first choice,” Stef says, ruffling her hair as she comes in and flops down on the bed. “I was going to go out, get some filming done for a vlog. You wanna come?”

She looks up suspiciously. “Where? Cos if you’re just going to take me to a boring museum like when we were in Wimbledon, I’d rather watch Pavlos playing video games.”

“I was going to go to Central Park,” he says, “And that museum in London wasn’t boring, it had a whole dinosaur skeleton.”

“I’ll come with,” she sighs dramatically. “But you better buy me ice cream.”

_Twelve year olds_, he thinks, but pulls his jacket on and follows her out all the same.

That night he looks over the footage he got from the afternoon: Elisavet on the subway, at the Central Park Zoo, leaning over a fence to brush a manta ray’s back, running through the piles of gold and red leaves. Shots of them both enjoying enormous chocolate ice creams, of buildings that seemed taller than the clouds, of people from every walk of life and every ethnicity rushing past at a million miles per hour, Elisavet commenting, with surprising wisdom, on the differences in the pace of life between New York and Athens. He transcribes it in his notebook and underneath, in a different coloured pen, writes out a loose translation into English for the subtitles.

She fell asleep on the subway back, her head resting on his shoulder. He couldn’t help but think, then, with a little ache in his heart, about how sweet and innocent she is, how untouched by the world, how she is still amazed by whooshing subway trains and still wants to run through autumn leaves. Looking at the footage now, with the sky dark and sickly-purple, Stef wonders where that part of him went. When he was her age, every tennis match was a gift, every victory or loss a lesson to be learnt. Now it feels like a job he turns up to every day out of expectation. The world knows him as a tennis player so he plays tennis. His arms and legs move to his command and he is playing as good as he ever has- maybe better, maybe these are his golden years- but there is ecstasy any more. No rush of joy like seeing a film constructing itself in its head come true in front of him on his computer, of seeing it published on Youtube and the views and comments rack up. Nothing like the feeling he gets when he nails a shot, captures something only he can, puts his feelings and perspectives into motion, communicates them to others. Maybe it’s a dry spell, he thinks, as he closes his laptop lid and tidies away his vlogging equipment. Maybe he just needs a good win, or a bit of time off. He tosses and turns for hours before sleep pulls at his itching eyes.

Sascha arrives the next day, and he knows, because Petros pounds on his door at asscrack in the morning to tell him.

“Zverev’s here,” he says.

“And?” Stef rubs his eyes. “He’s not Santa Claus.”

“Your nemesis is _back_,” Petros insists, “After months-”

“He’s not my nemesis,” Stef says, “We’re not in a film. Now fuck off and let me sleep.”

“Nah, man, you gotta get dressed and come down, we’re on Louis Armstrong at ten.”

Which is when he remembers what his dad put on the family groupchat the night before, about how he’d pulled some strings and got them two hours on-court at the main stadium, not the practice courts, that morning.

“Fuck,” he says.

“Don’t sound too excited,” Petros says.

“I am. Uh. Shit, OK. Tell dad I’ll be down in, like, ten.”

Ten ends up being about thirty, and his dad gives him an arch raised eyebrow when he finally comes down to the hotel breakfast room, but he’s there, and they get to Louis Armstrong on time. Ish.

“Why’d they name it after Louis Armstrong?” Petros says, pulling a racquet out his kit bag and giving it a few experimental swings.

“Huh?”

“Well, like, Louis Armstrong never played tennis. Did he even like tennis? Dunno, it’s just…y’know, you’ve got the Arthur Ashe court, why not- I dunno, the John McEnroe court?”

“John McEnroe’s still alive.” Stef bounces a ball off the edge of his racquet and shuffles his feet.

“So’s Billie Jean King.”

“Well, Roland Garros was a pilot, it’s not like any of this makes sense.”

“S’pose you’re right,” Petros shrugs.

“You can chat in the hotel, you know,” their father calls from the other end of the court, “But you can’t practice your serve there. Can we get on with it?”

Petros gives an apologetic wave and jogs to his place on the baseline. Stef trudges over to the other end and tries to ignore how the thought of two hours’ practice sits like a stone in his stomach.

He doesn’t know when Sascha arrived, but he notices him after about half an hour. He’s sitting where Stef’s family would be if this were a match. His feet are propped up in front of him, crossed at the ankles, his hands laced over his stomach. He looks like he’s relaxing in a hammock on his holidays, except his eyes are narrowed and following Stef’s every move. He’s alone, too. No Papa Zverev, no Mischa, no fitness coaches or physios or anything.

After an hour Apostolos calls for a ten-minute break, and Stef runs inside to follow the signs up to the players’ box.

He drops down into the seat next to Sascha and says nothing for a long moment, choosing his words carefully. But it’s Sascha who breaks the silence.

“I’m on Arthur Ashe in an hour,” he says. “Rafa wants to practise with me.”

“Is that a brag?” Stef replies.

Sascha looks round and grins. “A bit, yeah.”

Stef snorts. He looks down at his laces, where they’re coming loose, and his trainers are already wearing down.

“I wanted to come and say hi. I dunno. Sorry. I’ll go-”

“You don’t have to,” Stef cuts him off. “I’ve got ten minutes.”

“OK.”

Stef looks at him but he’s looking out over the court in front of him, eyes narrowed in thought. _I could kiss you, right now, lean over and kiss you_, he thinks, then blinks it away.

“Where does your dad think you are?”

He says nothing to that. Which is fair. Stef regrets it as soon as he says it.

“How long have you known you’re gay?” Sascha says instead.

And Stef finds the question strangely natural, a logical turn in the conversation.

“Since I was sixteen,” he says. He wants to add, _you?_, but Sascha’s eyes have gone wide and watery and Stef can see his whole body tense up. Later, perhaps. There’s all the time in the world.

“Does he know?”

On the court below his father is collecting stray balls and talking to Petros in rapid Greek.

“Not yet. But soon.”

“OK.”

Apostolos looks up and round and finally spots them. “Stefanos!” he calls, and taps his watch.

“Gotta go,” he says, as if Sascha wasn’t aware.

“I’ll go too. I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah,” Stef says. “Yeah, definitely.”

Rafa pulls Sascha aside half an hour into their practice, once Sascha’s father has gone off.

“You are OK?” he says, and he has that look of genuine, heartfelt concern that makes Sascha want to cry. “You look tired. Is no worries, you know, if you take the rest of the season off. No shame. You do what is right, no?”

“I’m fine, honest,” Sascha says, and wonders if his worry is written across his face for all to see, or if Rafa is just really perceptive. It’s probably a bit of both.

“You talk to me if you need to, OK? Me and Roger. I text you the address of the house we stay in.”

“Thanks, man,”

He knows he means it, and it breaks his heart, because how could he begin to explain? Rafa claps him on the shoulder and jogs away.

“We practice your volleying, OK? Is what Papa Zverev tell me to do.”

Elisavet is pacing up and down his room. It makes napping in front of Netflix very difficult.

“So,” she is saying, “Tomorrow you’re practising between ten and noon, then dad’s got us a reservation at Katsouri’s for seven in the evening, and then the day after that you’ve got press until two, and then the day after that-”

“I’ve got myself a secretary, huh?” he says. He’s slouched on the bed, one arm draped off the side.

“I’m just trying to work out all the time we have to go and do New York stuff. I want to go up the Empire State building, and I want to go to Times Square, and you probably want to go to some boring museum so I guess we’ll do that…”

She’s so sunny and gentle and bright and she’s really, honestly, his best pal. So it makes sense to tell her first.

“Elisavet,” he says, and she looks up. “You know I’m gay, right?”

“Yeah, duh. And mama wants to go to the Russian Tea Rooms, so we should do that…”

“And it doesn’t- you don’t mind?”

Her funny little face twists in confusion. “No. Why would I mind?”

“Dunno. Just checking.”

“OK. Are you seeing anyone?”

He thinks for a moment. “No,” he says, truthfully. “But…”

“There’s a guy?” she says. “Do you want me to be your wingwoman?”

He grins and laughs and leaps off the bed to tackle her and throw her over his shoulder and the buoyant joy of hearing her giggle makes him feel weightless.

He knocks softly, once, twice, on the door of Nick’s hotel room.

“Nick?” he calls, but the door swings open abruptly and standing in front of him is Nick’s mother, who he’s always been a bit scared of, knowing she’s technically royalty.

“Hello?” she says. “It’s Stefanos, isn’t it? Do you want to see Nicholas?”

“Yeah, I- Is he in?”

She nods and smiles brightly. “Nicholas!” she calls over her shoulder. “You have a friend come to see you!”

Nick arrives in sweatpants and sliders and looks tired and grouchy and really fucking hot, and Stefanos realises he doesn’t feel a flicker of attraction.

“Hey,” Nick says, in a low, rough voice.

“Hi, _Nicholas_,” Stef replies, because he can’t resist.

“What?” Nick scowls.

“Come out for a bit? We need to talk.”

Nick’s face wavers but he can see Stef means business, because he pulls on a jacket and calls to his mother, “Back in a bit, mum,” and they go out into the stifling evening.

They walk along the East River, lit by streetlamps, only dogwalkers and staggering drunks out to keep them company. In the distance, sirens wail and horns beep.

Stef says nothing til they get to the Queensboro Bridge, where they stand and look out at the glittering black water.

“You’re breaking up with me, aren’t you?” Nick says eventually. They lean out over the side and determinedly don’t look at each other.

“Yeah,” Stef says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” Nick says. “It was never anything- you know. Serious.”

“Yeah, but you deserve a proper conversation all the same.”

“Thanks, Steffi,” and it’s the first time Nick has sounded properly heartfelt since Stef met him. “It means a lot. Really. I know I’m not perfect, and I didn’t deserve it, but- you were always good to me. So thanks.”

Stef doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just hugs him. Breathes him in, his smell, too much cologne and weird shampoo, one last time.

“I’m gonna walk back,” Nick says. “Mum’ll riot if I’m not in bed by midnight. You coming?”

“I’m going to stay out here for a bit. Take in the air.”

Nick pulls a face. “Whatever you say, man. See you around.”

“Yeah, see ya.”

Nick turns and goes and Stef watches him get swallowed up by New York, and _just like that_, he thinks, _it’s over_. Strange how it doesn’t even sting.

He trudges up to his room in the cool, thick silence of hotel corridors. He flicks the light on in his suite, and there, sitting on his bed, is his mother.

“_Malaka_,” he yells, and springs backwards. “Jesus, mama, you scared me.”

“Language,” she says, but it’s gentle, and said with a smile. “Sorry, _zvezda moya_.”

“What are you doing here?” he says. His heart begins to return to its normal rate and he chucks his phone and wallet on the table.

“I thought you might need a cuddle,” she says.

“Why?”

“Breakups are hard, darling,” she says, and Stef freezes. His eyes widen. There goes his heart rate again.

“What do you mean?”

“You and Nick. I bumped into him in the lobby before, he looked pretty upset. Then you weren’t in your room, and I put two and two together.”

“But how did you- I’m- when did you-”

He sinks down onto the bed next to his mother and lets her pull him into a tight hug. He’s been taller than her since he was thirteen, but he still feels like her baby, like he could curl up on her lap and fall asleep in her arms like when he was little.

“_Solnyshko_,” she coos, “I’ve known about you and Nick for a while now.”

“Oh,” he says.

“You think you’re sneaky, but you forget, me and papa were young once, too.”

“Papa knows?”

“Mmhmm.”

“And he doesn’t…”

“Mind?” His mother pulls him even tighter and kisses him on top of his head. “No, my darling, of course he doesn’t mind. None of us do. Oh, my little one, did you think we would? Is that why you wouldn’t tell us?”

“Dunno,” he says, “I just didn’t…I guess I didn’t want it to be a big deal.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she says firmly. “You are who you are, and we love you, exactly as you are. Never doubt that, OK?”

“OK, mama,” he says.

“Now,” she says, sitting up, “How are you feeling? Do you need chocolate? Do you want me to find you a crappy film on Netflix? It’s not quite Christmas, but we could watch _Love Actually_ if you want.”

He giggles, and it is like light bubbles rising in a glass of lemonade. “No, mama, it’s fine. It was- I think it was a long time coming.”

“Is there someone else?”

And he’s tempted to lie, but she’s fixing him with her _I’m your mother don’t fuck with me_ look and she’s so good, better than he deserves, so he doesn’t. “There is, yeah. But…he’s not there yet.”

“I see,” she says sagely. “Well, whoever he is, he’s a very lucky man.”

He smiles and hugs her again and breathes in her smell, of safety and home. He savours it when she goes, sits for a moment in the feeling of being so loved, so lucky. Then he gets up and gets ready for bed, curls up under the covers, shuts his eyes, waits for tomorrow to come.

Sascha wakes with sour breath and a headache and the day only goes downhill from there.

His father storms into his room at six-thirty in the morning, before the sun has risen and half an hour before he said he would, already in a foul mood.

“Get up,” he barks. “Get up get up get up.” He pulls the duvet clean off the bed and Sascha curls in and round, knees tucked up to his chest, a flower furling in the night.

“I’m up,” he says, “I’m getting up, I’ll get up.”

He waits a split-second too long to move and his head is split open by his father clapping by his ear.

“Up-up-up!” he yells, “There is no time to lose!”

On another day, a few seasons ago, Sascha would have come back with something like _where’s the fire, jeez, dad_, but they’re well past that, and he knows what it would bring down on him, so he struggles out of bed and over to the bathroom.

“No time for a shower,” his father calls. “Brush your teeth, get your kit on, practice starts at seven.”

Mischa is waiting in the lobby, his eyes hooded with sleep, in as bad a mood as Alexander.

“Morning,” he mutters, and seems to be taking it personally that he’s awake because Sascha needs a practice partner.

“Sorry,” Sascha replies, low, in German, so their father won’t pick it up. He’s striding away, through the revolving door. It’s so early that the only person to watch them go is the night manager, sitting at the reception desk with a mug of coffee. Sascha catches her eye and she gives him a look and he wants to run over and say _no, listen, you don’t understand, it’s a family thing, it’s a Zverev thing_, but Mischa tugs him by the sleeve of his jacket and they clamber into the car.

They practise serves for what seems like hours, and Sascha wonders why Mischa is even there if all he’s doing is knocking balls back over into Sascha’s end.

“Papa,” Sascha calls, once the sun has risen fully and a little crowd of early birds have gathered in the stands. “Can we take a break? My arm hurts, and I’m hungry.”

“I’m hungry, too,” Mischa adds.

Alexander doesn’t even dignify them with a response, just tightens his mouth and flicks an index finger in the air. _Carry on_.

He finally calls for them to stop after another hour. Sascha packs his bag up without saying anything to Mischa. He feels _wiped_. He just wants to go back to the hotel. Sleep and sleep and sleep.

His heart sinks as he sees Josh, the publicist from Team 8, walking up to him in the corridor.

“Hey, Sascha,” he says, brightly, in English. “You ready to come to the press rooms?”

“You stay here?” his father says, “Press?”

“Better to get it all done in one go,” Josh says. “We’ll be done about six, is that OK? No clashes with the practise schedule?”

“No, we are done already for the day,” Alexander says. He turns to Sascha and speaks in Russian. “See you later, boy.”

“Bye, Sasch,” Mischa adds, and they go off together, and Sascha’s very _bones_ ache with the exhaustion.

Stefanos wakes early, before his alarm, and he and Petros go for a run before breakfast. He breathes in great lungfuls of New York air. He feels fresh. Rested. He feels good. He doesn’t even mind that he has press all day. It’s all happening down at the arena, where a series of airless rooms are boxed off for the purpose. It’s a little bit like being back at school, with everyone hanging around together, players he hasn’t seen in person in months. Ash Barty claps him on the shoulder and says _good luck for this week, mate_, and he grins and says _thanks_, and Diego’s there and gives him cheery finger-guns, and even Rafa- who looks deeply bored already- flashes him a grin from the other side of the room.

Apostolos follows him in and hangs back with the other coaches. He quickly gets lost in conversation with Charly Moya and all the others and Stef really _does_ feel like when he was at school, sent off into a playground full of five year olds, left to fend for himself.

He scans the crowd and picks out a mop of blond hair and a stooped frame. There he is, Sascha Zverev, slumped in a chair like he hopes if he makes himself small no one will notice him. Stef has no plans to afford him that privilege. He marches over and sits down beside him.

“Hi,” he says. “You look tired.”

“Thanks,” Sascha replies. “You look like a twat.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. He either has to speak up to be heard over the din or lean in close to Sascha’s ear, and he knows which of those options he prefers. This close he can smell Sascha, like fresh sweat and something essentially male.

“I know,” Sascha replies. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

“I can get you a coffee.” Stef motions over to the table on the other side of the room, which is laid out with refreshments and an enormous percolator humming in the corner.

“It’s not that sort of tiredness,” Sascha says. “Thanks, though.”

Stef leans back into the thick pleather of the chair. It squeaks against his bare calves. Sascha is sitting in that resigned posture that he’s come to know, knees spread, hands clasped between them, head bowed.

“Are you OK, Sascha?” he says.

“I’m fine,” Sascha replies brusquely, but adds, after a moment’s hesitation, “What hotel are you at?”

“The Quin.”

“I’m at the Pierre,” he says. “Can I-”

“Suite twenty,” Stef says. “Come round, any time. I’m getting bored of beating the kids at _Mario Kart_.”

Sascha says nothing for a moment. Looks up, scans the room. Stefanos can see the cogs turning behind his blue eyes.

“Thanks,” he says, eventually.

Stefanos wants to slide a friendly hand over his shoulder, to hug him. He doesn’t, though. Just sits. Says nothing. Lets the silence say it all.

Their first-round matches are on the same day. Stef’s managed to get himself drawn against Feli Lopez, while Sascha is playing some anonymous Portuguese kid who got in on a wildcard. Stef wins in three, Sascha in four; Stef watches the highlights of Sascha’s match in physio that afternoon, and it was a struggle- he got broken more times than he should have, and there was yelling and a racquet got smashed- but he did it, and left the court smiling and assured, shoulders back, head up. There was a cut to Alexander, sitting in the player’s box, sandwiched between Jez and one of the other physical trainers. They were beaming, on their feet, cheering. Alexander wasn’t. His face was set and grim.

They’re on opposite ends of the draw, destined- if that is how it ends up- to meet in the semis. Stef mulls that over in his mind, ruminates on what kind of Sascha he would be meeting in the semi-finals of the US Open. A true opponent. He hopes for it, as stupid and nonsensical as it is, and tells himself it is because he wants to win against Sascha, but there is a quiet part of him that’s only getting louder that’s saying it might be because he wants to lose.

It takes another four days and two rounds.

Sascha’s father wakes him up every morning at six and he’s down on the practice court by seven, even if he has a match that day. By bedtime- 9 PM, like when he was in primary school- he is grateful to shut his eyes and let his tired muscles rest.

Anyway: round three, a five-set marathon against Dimitrov, but he does it, gets out of it in the end, comes off court feeling like a sack of rocks. He checks Twitter that evening, despite himself, and sees that he’s apparently an ungrateful brat for failing to look suitably cheerful and positive in his press conference. He wants to reply to all the anonymous accounts, to the hacks and the superfans, to tell them that by this point, he’s just glad he’s able to haul himself around the court, and would they like to come and play a grand slam and look cheerful in front of the vultures in the pressers? He doesn’t, though, just finds a half-decent picture of himself waving at the crowd after his match and sticks it on Instagram with a nice caption in English he hopes is accurate. He’s too tired to check, or care.

Then, before he can tell himself not to, he is on the US Open Youtube channel, and watching Stef’s presser.

“Questions for Stefanos Tsitsipas,” the press lady says as Stef slides into the chair. Something’s not right.

Stef beat de Minaur in straights, an easy, unassailable, confident win, Alex practically handing him the match tied up with a bow, his forehand haywire and no match for Stef’s speed. But Stef looks like he’s just lost. Badly. To a player no one’s heard of. He looks like Sascha usually does, then.

“Stefanos,” someone says, and Sascha recognises it as that guy from _The Times_ who chews his pen. “How are you feeling after that match? Pretty good, I would imagine.”

“Yeah,” Stef says, and if Sascha turns the volume up and rewinds, he can even hear the ripple of reaction that gets. Stef’s voice is flat and empty. Wrong-wrong-wrong. “Yeah,” Stef tries again. “Feeling really good. Really happy with my performance today.”

Someone else: “You seem a little tired- how are you coping with the physical demands of a grand slam?”

“It’s not ph-” Sascha watches in fascination as Stef seems to stop himself, catch his sentence just as it is leaving his mouth. He readjusts. Sits up. Shrugs his shoulders back. Stefanos Tsitsipas returns, golden curls and white smile. “I’m not tired, not really. Maybe a little bit, but I just need to get some sleep. I’m all good. I’ve been looking forward to New York.”

That seems to satisfy the hacks and they move on to a blow-by-blow analysis of his oh-so-extraordinary backhand, which makes Sascha feel a little queasy. Anyway, he’s seen enough. He opens Whatsapp.

**You in your room?**

_Yep_ comes the reply a few minutes later, and Sascha gets up before he can convince himself not to.

The door opens on a very tired-looking Stefanos and Sascha instantly feels guilty for coming round. The poor guy probably wanted to sleep.

“Hey, Sasch,” he says, and his eyes light up, and it makes Sascha feel. Odd. “Come in.”

“I’m not bothering you, am I?”

Stef flashes him a funny look. “No. Why?”

Sascha shrugs.

“It’s good to talk to someone else. Outside the family, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Sascha says.

“I’m sure your dad-” Sascha watches him bite his tongue again, the same way he did in the press conference. It doesn’t sit right. He doesn’t want press-conference Stef.

He doesn’t know what he wants, really.

“You want a drink?” Stef motions to the minibar. “Nothing alcoholic, sorry, it looks like they’ve comped players before.”

“Yeah, it’s all spirulina and carrot juice in my suite,” Sascha says.

“Gross. Diet Coke?”

“Sounds good.”

Sascha watches as he bends down to open the minibar. He’s wearing a light cotton t-shirt- plucked, no doubt, from a pile left by the press people at Adidas- and his back is broad and the muscles of his shoulders defined. An image, then, unbidden, unwilled: his hands splayed across Stef’s back, pressing kisses to his neck, burying his face in his hair.

He tenses. Digs his fingernails into the soft skin of his palms. He’s half-hard and wills his dick to behave. Not now, not him, not this.

They were kids, once. The Orange Bowl and the car and Usher and- things were so much simpler. They never knew each other, though. They never practised together and Stef was at the academy and Sascha only knew him as another player. But something about him-

“Here.” Stef passes him a can and the moment passes. He’s so casual and light and _god_, he’s probably not thinking about-

“You can sit down, you know,” Stef goes on. “I’ll put the TV on, if you want. The Playstation’s in Petros’ room, but I can go and get it.”

“Nah, it’s OK.” Sascha watches as Stef jumps onto the bed, props himself up against the headboard and pops his can open. He gingerly goes over and joins him. He sits as close to the edge as he can without falling off. There’s not an inch of their skin touching and no chance of it happening but Sascha swears he can feel the heat radiating off Stef.

“What do you want to watch?”

“I dunno. It’s your room. You have good taste. Uh. In TV.” Sascha blushes scarlet and Stef has the grace not to say anything, or maybe he just doesn’t notice. Maybe Sascha’s reading way too much into this. He probably is. There’s probably no need to panic.

“OK, well, if you wanna watch something British, there’s this great show called _Life On Mars_, it’s like- I mean, it’s sort of sci-fi, and it’s sort of a cop show, and it’s set in Manchester. It’s really cool.”

“Sounds good,” Sascha says, and feels very aware of how often he’s saying that, is he repeating himself, does Stef think he’s weird-

“I’m gonna order room service, you want anything?”

“Uh-”

Stef tosses him the menu and Sascha skims it as he sets up the TV.

“I’ll have the tortellini,” he says. “Are you on Venmo or- I don’t have cash, sorry-”

Stef snorts and looks at him funny. “They’ve comped me for the whole tournament, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And even if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t…”

“Right.”

Sascha takes his phone out of his pocket to pretend to scroll through Twitter while Stef orders on the phone. He’s in Stef’s hotel room, on his _bed_, eating food with him, watching TV with him- a year ago, any of that would have been unthinkable. Then again, a year ago, a lot of things were different.

It takes them a couple of episodes to get through the mountain of pasta that arrives. Stef, again, has impeccable taste- the show is weird and kind of dark and they have to put the subtitles on to understand the accents, but Sascha finds himself completely losing track of time. He finally puts his plate to one side and checks his phone.

“Jesus, it’s midnight.”

“We’re not playing tomorrow,” Stef says mildly. He has his hands folded over his stomach and his legs are crossed at the ankle and he still looks tired, but not as exhausted as he did before.

“No, but- I have to get up early to practise, and-”

“Are you happy?” Stef says suddenly. He turns to look at Sascha and there are those eyes, wide and open and deep. That’s it. That’s the _something_.

“Happy?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean-” Sascha sits up a bit. “Like, with my tennis, or life, or what?”

“All of it.”

Sascha shrugs. “I dunno. My tennis is- I mean, I’m just glad my tennis is getting better. Uh. I’m in the fourth round of the US Open, and three months ago I was in bed feeling like shit. My family are happy when I win, so that makes me feel good.”

“And does that make you happy in your life? Doing well in tennis?”

“Yeah,” Sascha says. “Yeah. Sure.” Stef says nothing, just stares at him. “I mean, I guess. Why? Are _you _happy?”

Stef smiles sadly. “I don’t think I am. I mean- it’s stupid. Everything’s going right, and I’m just not happy. And what’s worse is, I think I know how I could be happy, but it’s not…there. It’s so close, and I can’t touch it.”

All the air disappears from the room. Sascha’s looking at Stef and Stef’s looking at him. He thinks of the taxi after the Laver Cup, and what would have happened if he- how would this year have-

“I gotta go,” he says. He springs up like he’s been burnt and grabs his jacket. “I gotta- uh- dad’s going to wake me up at six tomorrow, I’m gonna feel like shit if I don’t get to bed.”

“OK,” Stef says. Sascha can’t read his voice. “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, I- yeah.”

He gets back to his room and barely bothers to switch the light on and take his shoes off, just shucks his jeans past his knees and wraps his hand around his cock. No need for porn, of any variety, just the sound of Stef’s voice ringing in his ears and his hair and his eyes and the gentle way he moves and touches him and what if he’d kissed him, what if he’d done it-

He wipes his hand off on the pillow on the other side of the bed, and falls asleep fully-clothed with the lights on.

His fourth-round match is against Andrey and so the locker room is abuzz with Russian. Andrey’s team are all on one side of the room and Sascha is on the other with his father. It’s a weird, almost cramped place, the locker room in New York, all out-of-date carpet and dark wood. Sascha gets there early and they all sit, percolating, for a long while.

He stares down at the draw sheet: _Zverev, A. v. Rublev, A, not before 14:30_, and above that, _Tsitsipas, S. v. Djokovic, N, 11 AM_. The match is playing, muted, on a TV above them, and Sascha wants to ask his dad to turn it off but he also can’t look away.

Stefanos is up two sets but then Novak wins the third on a tiebreak and they’re just getting into the swing of the fourth set, two games apiece, when the heavens open.

They can hear it from the locker room, a clap of thunder that shocks everyone into momentary silence, before the hammering of raindrops on the roof.

Novak and Stef and their respective teams arrive in the locker room, soaked to the bone already, and the room becomes even more overcrowded and stuffy. A steward follows them in and announces a delay of at least half an hour, and that sets off a round of ill-tempered grumbling in Russian and Greek and Serbian. Sascha just retreats further into his seat. His dad isn’t even looking at him, he’s watching someone on Rublev’s team remonstrate with the steward. His mind is so consumed by the thought of the match- when it will happen, how long they’ll have to wait, whether this will give Andrey an advantage- that he doesn’t notice Stef walking past until he’s right next to him.

“Hey,” he says, casually.

“Hey,” Sascha manages to choke. _Well done, idiot_.

“I’m gonna…” Stef motions to the door of one of the little rooms that seem to be constantly filled with snacks, tables and tables of fruit bowls and pasta and bags of nuts. “You wanna come?”

“I can’t,” Sascha says. He glances over to his father and Stef follows his gaze.

“OK,” he says, “Well, y’know…”

“Yeah.”

The delay ends up being an hour, during which Novak tries several times to engage him in conversation. It doesn’t work. He can’t just talk to Novak, especially not when his father is sitting a few feet away. Novak eventually gives up and goes and has a kickabout with Andrey. His father eyes them as they chat and laugh together and Sascha sits alone, at the other end of the locker room.

“You should join them,” he says, like he’s not the reason Sascha feels like shit, like he doesn’t _know_ his presence makes everything odd and awkward.

“Don’t feel like it,” Sascha mutters. “Don’t wanna get tired.”

Which starts his father off on a lecture about how he’ll seize up, he should be doing jumping jacks and press-ups, but he’s lazy, and that’s why Rublev’s going to win today.

“You should have taken the rest of the season off,” he says, and Sascha wants to snap _you’re the reason I’m here, you were the one who ignored what Dr Lagarde said_, but he doesn’t, because he can’t.

Anyway, eventually Stefanos emerges and the steward sends them back out. Sascha and his father watch mutely as Novak wrestles the fourth set off Stef.

At the start of the fifth, Andrey gets up and he and his team slope off elsewhere, and then Sascha and his father are alone. The first two games go Novak’s way, easy, but in the third Stef finds his momentum on his serve, and suddenly things are looking hot. He’s moving around the court like he owns the place, executing ridiculous dives and lobs and striking out towards the net like a scorpion.

At three games to two Sascha feels a sudden itching under his skin and has to get up and walk about, and then, if only to escape his father, goes for a shower. He leaves his kit on one of the benches and stands in the blast of hot water for what feels like no time at all. When he’s done, he takes his time rubbing himself dry and then sits on the bench in just his towel. There’s a door between him and his father. He’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.

There are bruises on his ribs. Not shockingly dark like when they first formed- more a sickly yellow now. If he prods them he can feel the blows as they first fell. That was for smashing his racquet and yelling, a quick burst of Alexander’s anger that left Sascha lying on the floor of his suite until his head stopped spinning and he could drag himself into bed.

He’s lost in that thought when the door bursts open. He’s expecting his father and stands up. He gets Stefanos.

“Sorry, I.” He swallows. Stef is drenched in sweat and grinning from ear to ear. “Did you win?”

“Yeah,” Stef breathes. “Took the scenic route, but I did it.”

“That’s great, man.” And for the first time he realises he means it. He looks at Stefanos, back pressed up against the dark wooden door of the shower room, dark blue Adidas kit, those red-and-white shoes, legs trembling, chest rising and falling in shallow breaths, the dark dust of his stubble, his hair messy and ratty, and _oh fuck_. _Oh, dear God_.

“I’ve got to, um.”

“Go?” Stef says. He smiles and it’s sort of teasing and sort of not, and then he’s walking towards Sascha, step by heavy step, echoing off the tiles.

“Yeah, uh. Andrey. Um.”

“Well, good luck, right? I wanna meet you in the semis.”

“Yeah, the, um.” His voice is wavering as Stef crowds into his personal space, and he might be taller than him but he doesn’t feel it. “Stefanos,” he says, and then Stef kisses him.

Takes his face in his big, generous hands and presses their lips together. Stef’s warm and soft and Sascha’s kissing him, kissing Stef, kissing a boy, and it feels right, it feels good, it’s the answer to a question he’s been asking all his life. Stef opens his mouth and lets him in and Sascha finds the taste of lemonade, like he’d been drinking it at changeovers, and something else, something new, something girls never had. Stef shifts his hand to grab a handful of Sascha’s hair and pull him in tighter. Sascha shivers. A moan escapes him and he feels it rumble across their lips and he thinks _this is it, this is heaven, I never want to stop doing this_, and just as he does Stef springs back because there’s a knock at the door.

Stef disappears into a shower cubicle and Sascha manages to pull on his compression pants and shorts before his dad barges in, which is lucky, because he’s sporting a hardon that only the black fabric of his shorts and his t-shirt pulled down low can disguise. He pulls on his shirt and ties his trainers with a double knot and lopes out onto the court, and when he beats Andrey in three and realises he’s in the quarter-finals of the US Open, it’s almost an anti-climax.

He stumbles off court after an hour and a half. His father is waiting for him.

“Good,” is all he says.

Sascha can almost feel the trophy in his arms, the heft of it and the cold metal on his skin. But he can’t imagine his father ever being truly, finally satisfied with his performance. He could triple-bagel Roger in the Wimbledon final and Alexander would no doubt make him go over videos of his serve for hours after.

His mother comes into his hotel room afterwards and plants kisses all over the top of his head and says stuff like _my baby, we’re so proud_, but she always says that, win or lose, so it doesn’t mean much.

He lies back in a pile of pillows on his bed and turns the TV on. He flicks through video clips of the coverage- watches Andrey’s presser, because he can, and he reckons he’s earnt it. Then he gets to Stef’s presser. He looks chirpier, at least, sitting up and smiling bright in the chair, Adidas jacket zipped up to his chin. Sascha tries to search his eyes for some sign that Stef’s thinking about him the same way Sascha is, and then realises how stupid that is, because it’s a press conference, it’s not like Stef’s going to sit down and announce that he snogged Alexander Zverev in the locker room today. If he looks happier than usual, it’s because he’s beaten Novak Djokovic. Not because of whatever the _fuck_ happened in the locker room.

Third question in comes from Ubaldo- the voice is unmistakeable.

“If you beat Wawrinka on Thursday, and Sascha beats Khachanov, you’ll play your semi-final against him. Are you looking forward to another match-up with your rival?”

Stef huffs out a little laugh which Sascha has come to learn means _bless, it’s so sweet they let him carry on coming to pressers even now he’s senile_.

“Ah,” he begins, “That is a lot of ifs, isn’t it? _If_ I beat Stan, _if_ Sascha beats Karen- anything could happen, just because I beat Novak today and just because Sascha’s had a great run doesn’t mean we can take the next round for granted. I think if you asked Sascha, he would say the same. So, really, I’m not thinking about the semis.”

_Liar_, Sascha thinks, and, anyway, who’s he to put words in Sascha’s mouth?

“And as for Sascha being my rival- well, I think that’s true, but I think you’re implying something that isn’t true, and I would be careful how you phrase it.”

“What am I implying?” Ubaldo replies, just audible, if Sascha jacks the volume right up.

“You’re implying that there is, um, hostility between me and Sascha, and I don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t want to contribute to a cheapening of journalism by trying to create drama where there isn’t any.”

_Pretentious prick_.

“So you and Sascha are rivals, but not enemies?”

“Not at all,” Stef says, and Sascha can pick up on the impatience in his voice even if the journalists can’t. “Sascha is a very good friend of mine. We’re very close.” A shadow of a pause. “He means a lot to me.”

They’re halfway through a game of Fifa. Stefanos’ Manchester United is 5-2 up against Petros’ AC Milan. Petros suddenly hits pause.

“You can’t just quit cos you’re angry you’re losing,” Stefanos says, rolling his eyes.

“Is Sascha Zverev the guy?”

Stefanos whips his head round. Petros throws a handful of popcorn into his mouth and eyes him with a raised eyebrow.

“What do you mean, is Sascha the guy? What guy?”

“The guy you’ve been mooning over for the past year.”

Stefanos decides to skip past the fact that Petros apparently knows he’s gay. His entire family does, it seems, and just didn’t bother to tell him.

“He’s my friend,” Stef says carefully. He unpauses Fifa and scores another goal while Petros is still fumbling with his controller.

“Fucker. And that’s not what I asked.”

“Don’t be a sore loser.” And just for that, Petros flicks a goal in with an annoying combo of moves that he probably looked up online, like a nerd.

“Is he the guy, though? Is that who you’re losing it over?”

“I’m not losing it,” Stef snaps, then blushes beetroot when Petros crows in triumph.

“Ha!” he cries, and pauses the game again, “Wait there, Elisavet owes me ten euros.”

“What?” Stef says.

“We had a bet going, she thought it was Thiem.”

Several thoughts go through his mind at once- Elisavet and Petros had a bet going on who Stef fancies? Petros is actually going to go and take ten euros off an eleven-year-old? Elisavet thought he fancied _Dominic Thiem_?

But perhaps most important of all, the one that pounds in the front of his head to the beat of the pause music on the game, is that Sascha hasn’t said a word to him since it happened. He was an idiot. He shouldn’t have- Sascha isn’t _there_, not yet. There’s something in him, though, deeper than anything he’s felt before. More than the quiet, fumbling comfort of the boy at the academy. More than the thrill of rebellion that Nick brought. More even than his awkward, puppy-dog crush on Sascha that had him following him around at the Laver Cup, thirsty for even the slightest physical touch.

It’s something like the urge to see Sascha happy, no matter what that means. Like the desire to hold him. To protect him. To tell him the truth.

He picks up his phone, opens Whatsapp, hovers over the _call_ button, catches his breath. He doesn’t dial.

It’s something a lot like-

Stef squints through the chicken wire of the practice court to watch Sascha on the next one along.

Christos currently has him doing serve-and-volley drills, but he’s consulting with Apostolos at that moment, the pair of them poring over scribbled diagrams on Christos’ omnipresent clipboard.

There’s no clipboard on Practice Court 3. No friendly smiles, no encouragement, no _davai, Sasch_, not even Mischa. Just Alexander Sr. and Jr., on opposite sides of the net, trench warfare. Sascha looks skinny and pale and _tired_, so tired. Stef saw Karen, who Sascha’s supposed to be playing at noon tomorrow, in the maze of corridors at the arena, looking bright and happy and ready to go. Sascha’s fucked. And Stef reckons he knows it, reckons his father knows it, reckons Jez, who has long since been consigned to the sidelines, extraneous to Alexander’s masterplan, knows it.

“Earth to Stefanos,” Chris calls, and Stef snaps out of it, remembers he has a job to do, even if he doesn’t want to in the slightest, and carries on.

It’s during another pause in practise that Stef’s ears prick up at the sound of the word _neudachnik_, failure, and he when he glances over his heart drops. Alexander has Sascha by the scruff of his neck and is leading him- though it looks more like he’s dragging him- inside.

He looks over at Jez, who’s still sitting there, as if paralysed. _Do something_, Stef urges him silently. _Fucking hell, do something_.

But he doesn’t.

So Stef tosses his racquet to one side and jogs over to the gate.

“Where do you think you’re going?” his father says, looking up from the clipboard.

“Gimme five minutes.” He doesn’t break his stride, just calls over his shoulder.

Stef shoves the locker room door open. He sees Sascha first, against the wall, crouched, shrunken. Then his father, pacing back and forth. Yelling. It’s so loud Stefanos wants to slam the door shut again and stick his fingers in his ears and walk away. It makes his head fuzzy and his skin tingle. But Sascha is sitting on the floor, crying, chanting _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_, and the instinct to protect overtakes any other.

“Sascha,” he calls, in as level a voice he can. “Hey, man, is everything OK?”

Alexander spins around and clocks him. “Stefanos,” he says, and he’s not instantly under control the way he was the last time. Stef is scared. This is unpredictable. Sascha’s gaze flicks between them, panicked. “You need to go, son, this is a private conversation, hm?”

“Yeah, it’s just,” Stef feels his face flush as he struggles to think of an excuse to get Sascha out of the room. “My, um. My dad was wondering if Sascha wanted to hit with me for a bit. Um. Before the light goes.”

They have a good hour before the sun sets, and in any case, the courts are all floodlit, but Alexander seems to consider this, and in doing so, the white-hot fury leaves him.

“That sounds good,” he says, voice on the edge of control. “Thank you, Stefanos, that sounds like a good idea.” He turns to Sascha, who is still on the floor, and talks to him like nothing is wrong. “Sascha, say thank you.”

“Thanks, Stefanos,” Sascha manages to croak, and pulls himself to his feet. They traipse out and Stef has questions, like, why does he yell at you like that, why don’t you tell him where to go, do I need to kill him for you, because I will. Questions like, those bruises on your chest, they’re from him, aren’t they?

But he doesn’t, because Alexander is right behind them. They go out onto the court, and Stef’s father raises an eyebrow but, thank God, says nothing, and Alexander stands where the umpire’s chair would be for the entire following hour. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of sunglasses but Stef can see his head tracking Sascha’s every movement, and as soon as Apostolos calls time, he marches over and steers Sascha off the court.

It’s just him and his father in the car back. The autumn light is purple and grey and if Stef sticks his nose out the window like a dog he can smell the air. His father turns to him as they leave Flushing.

“You’re in love,” he says. Not a question. Not a judgement. Just a statement.

“Yeah,” Stef sighs. “I am.”

Apostolos pulls him in and kisses the top of his head. “You silly boy. You like to make life hard for yourself, don’t you?”

“Mmm.”

“How long?”

Stef leans back into the seat and thinks for a moment. Since the summer? Since Indian Wells? Since the Laver Cup? Since they were kids?

“A long time,” he settles for.

“And you think he feels the same?”

Stef bites the skin at the corner of his thumb. “I think so. I just don’t think he knows it yet.”

“You’ve got your work cut out for you. His dad is-”

“Evil,” Stef interrupts. Apostolos laughs softly.

“One day, my boy, you’ll realise that things aren’t so black-and-white. I think Alexander loves him, in his own way, and I think he thinks he’s doing the best for him.”

Some days at the Academy lasted for epochs, whole years of misery unfurling at the pace of tectonic motion. Endless nights of crying silently so the other boys wouldn’t hear him. Hours on the court hitting returns, every twinge in his muscles screaming _you aren’t good enough, you never will be_. And then, only a few years later, Apostolos doing press for Patrick, saying how sending Stefanos away was the hardest decision he ever had to make but the best one. It never seemed hard for him when he’d drive Stef to the airport after holidays, unhook his clinging fingertips one by one from his arms to push him, weeping, towards the security gates. Maybe he cried in the car back. Maybe it _was_ difficult for him. Maybe sending him away _was_ the greatest decision he ever made.

Stefanos loves his father with a lion-like fierceness, but a whole portion of his soul can’t forgive him, never will.

_He’s doing what’s best for him_ rattles round his brain for hours after. He wonders, as he falls asleep, if Sascha is thinking the same.

Sascha accepts the match is lost after two sets.

Karen is playing like a machine. He’s hitting ace after ace, and he’s reacting to Sascha’s service game like he can read his mind. None of Sascha’s challenges have gone his way. He avoids getting bagelled, but only just, and in the pause between the second and third sets he sinks down onto the bench and shoves his face into a towel to cry.

“Davai, Sasch!” someone calls behind him. He wants to climb up and punch them. He wants to retire, actually, pretend he has a foot injury or has suddenly developed the lurgy, just to kill this while it’s only a little tragic, deny Karen the joy of a three-set victory.

He doesn’t, of course. Just glances up to his father in the box, and tries to avoid total humiliation.

“Are you OK, man?” Karen says at the net.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, and now he wants to punch Karen, nice, lovely Karen, a new dad, a friend, someone who doesn’t mean the slightest harm.

His father says nothing to him until they get back to the hotel, and when they do, Sascha accepts what comes. Watches it from above himself, sees his own body collapse and fall to the ground, his own knees curl up to his chest.

_Neudachnik, neudachnik, neudachnik_, then _solnyshko, solnyshko, solnyshko_, my boy, we’ll try again, I’ll learn not to lose control, I promise, my boy, this time I mean it.

Sascha hates himself for believing it.

Minutes or hours later there’s a knock at the door and Sascha hobbles over to answer it. If it’s his father, he’s playing with fire by ignoring it, and if it’s not, well, he needs to get up and stretch so he doesn’t seize up.

Stefanos is standing at the door, holding, for no apparent reason, one of those chocolate rabbits that Roger gets free from Lindt all the time.

“Hi,” he says. “Roger gave me- so I thought- when I lose, I want chocolate. Um.”

Sascha says nothing but lets him walk in and pace the room like a cat deciding where to nap.

“Your dad,” he begins and Sascha’s stomach lurches.

“Not, please, can we, um.”

“Of course,” Stef says hurriedly. “Sorry. I was just worried.”

Sascha still feels like he’s in a dream. Like Stef, leaning against the wardrobe in his hotel suite, is a mirage.

“Don’t be worried,” Sascha says mechanically. “I’m fine. Congratulations.”

“Sascha,” Stef breathes, and then he’s coming over, all warmth and care. Their lips press together and for a brief moment it’s wonder, stars aligning, a kiss that makes him believe in- but then Sascha pushes him away.

“Fuck off,” he spits. “Get the fuck off me, you fucking faggot.”

“Sasch-”

“I should fucking report you. Tell the press about you. You fucking pervert.”

“Sascha, please.” A begging note in his voice, like _papa I’m sorry_, and Sascha wants to vomit. If he looks in the mirror he would see Alexander.

“Get out!” he yells. “Get the fuck out of my room, leave me the fuck alone, get out, get out, get _out_!”

So Stef goes, and Sascha is alone, and the bruises rise on his china-white skin. 

The next few days seem to run together. Stef must, at some point, sleep and eat and shower. But he’s only really aware of himself when he’s on court, when he hears the stadium roar. When he beats Karen in four his entire family encircle him in an awkward group-hug-sandwich in the locker room. Everyone’s voices mingle together. _We love you_ and _we’re so proud_ and _you’re killing it_, all slurred into one.

“Thanks,” he says, over and over. “Thank you, I love you too.”

He shut his eyes. He opens them. He’s out on court again. He and Roger stand at the net, a little kid in front of them beaming at the camera. As they step away for the warmup, Roger touches him gently on the arm and says, low, so the umpire can’t hear: “Whatever happens, you know you’ve got me, right?”

Stef doesn’t really know what that means, but later, he wonders if Roger somehow knew.

And then he plays five sets of the best tennis of his life. Point after point. His muscles ache and his lungs burn, sure, but the real exhaustion is mental, the fight to keep his reflexes on edge for three and a half hours.

And then, a backhand down the line, Roger mistiming it by a fraction of a second, and the ball flies wide. And Stef’s won the US Open.

He holds the gleaming cold metal of the trophy, he hears the stadium itself scream. He looks Roger in the eye as the greatest tennis player in the world, his idol, shakes his hand and says _well done_.

And he feels nothing.

They decamp to a Greek bar somewhere in Brooklyn, and everyone wants to buy Stef a drink, and he takes polite sips of every one, and then palms them off on others, or pours them into plant pots. He’s panicking. Quietly. A bit. Because he’s just achieved his dream, the intangible-made-tangible _thing_ he’s wanted since he was old enough to speak. And yet there’s a gaping hole inside him where the joy and satisfaction should be. Just the thought, _is that it?_ He knows, then, what he has to do.

“I’m gonna take Elisavet back to the hotel,” he says to his father, who has just finished heartily toasting every single one of Stefanos’ primary school teachers, even Mrs Paphides, who kept him in at lunchtime to finish his maths problems.

Apostolos looks round and frowns in confusion. “Your mama will do it, or Petros. You’re here to celebrate.”

“It’s fine,” Stef says. “I’ll just drop her off and come straight back. Look, she’s flagging.” He motions over to the other side of the room where Elisavet is falling asleep against a bust of Ioannis Metaxas. His father shrugs. Stef goes over and taps her on the shoulder.

“Bedtime, kiddo,” he says.

“No,” she protests, “Just a bit longer, I wanna see Christos do ‘Fast Car’ on the karaoke machine. He thinks he can sing…”

“I’ll take a video of it and text it to you,” he promises. “Bedtime.”

She reluctantly gets up and follows him out, and they get into the car that’s waiting outside, because he’s a grand slam winner and has cars waiting for him.

He steers her into the suite she’s sharing with their parents and, out of force of habit, tidies things up while she brushes her teeth and gets into her pyjamas.

“Do you want me to check the wardrobe for monsters?” he says, standing at the door of her room.

“Stef,” she groans. “I’m _twelve_.”

“Do you want me to check or not?”

She folds her arms and frowns and looks just like their father when she does. “OK, if it’ll make you feel better.”

He checks thoroughly, because this has been his job since she was born, and he knows just where the monsters might like to hide. And then he switches off her light and shuts the door, and there is just the sound of the ticking clock.

He’s twenty-two. He’s a grand slam champion.

He’s sure, now, more sure about this than he has been about anything else.

***

_We’re in Monte Carlo_, the text reads. _You and I should meet up_.

Roger Federer might now, improbably, be his friend, but a text from him like that still reads to Sascha more as an order than an invitation. _We_. He and Rafa. They don’t have a place of their own out here, but they have a friend who does. They’re adults with houses, and friends who have houses. They go on holiday together and they live together. They got married, had a beautiful wedding that they kept strictly private, and sometimes Sascha will be sitting next to Roger and he’ll know that Roger isn’t listening to whatever he’s just said, because Rafa’s on the other side of the room, and it’s no competition.

**Sounds good**, he replies. **I’ll come to yours**.

_Understood_, Roger replies, which sounds ominous.

Their place is one of those huge ridiculous villas, right next to the sea, hidden from prying eyes by palm trees and patrolled by a scary-looking private security guard and an Alsatian.

Rafa answers the door, a great big beaming smile on his face. “Come in!” he crows, and pulls Sascha into a tight hug before Sascha can say anything else. “We have missed you.”

“You saw me last week,” Sascha protests, following him into the hall. Rafa’s face twitches just a little. _Last week_ is a lot.

“I am going,” Rafa says. “I leave you with Roger.”

“_Mi rey_?” Roger comes out of one of (_one of_) the sitting rooms. His shoes squeak on the parquet floor. He’s rolling up the sleeves of his cotton shirt, showing his tanned skin and the thick dark hair that grows above his wrists. He looks gorgeous. Of course. Effortlessly so, like he’s always on standby for his closeup. Sascha looks first to him, then to Rafa, whose eyes have gone soft and moony, and who is already moving over to wrap an arm round his waist and kiss his cheek. A stab of envy runs through him.

“_Cariño_,” Rafa purrs, “I go out, there are press things…” he waves his free hand to indicate _press things_\- shoots, interviews, pretending to give a shit about a soft drink brand. “I see you later, hm?”

“See you,” Roger replies, and kisses him lightly on the lips with easy, unselfconscious intimacy. Rafa shuts the door behind him with a click. Dust falls in a beam of light from a window over the stairs and Sascha stands very still to take in the luxury and luck that Roger and Rafa have had.

“Come in,” Roger says after a moment. “I’ll make coffee. It’s not quite warm enough to sit outside but we can sit in the conservatory. There’s a chaise longue, if you feel like swooning.”

Roger moves around with ease and poise and dignity and Sascha feels like a great lumbering useless hulk of flesh. If _he’d_ had a US Open final like Roger’s had, he wouldn’t be looking half as chipper.

Sascha is steered into the conservatory, which is warm and airy like everywhere else in the house, and looks out on a huge garden, a tennis court at one end, the clay being maintained by a uniformed groundskeeper. It’s wonderful. Sascha feels like total shit.

Roger arrives with the coffee, and sits opposite Sascha. He pours and stirs in milk and sits back and takes a long sip and says nothing.

“I guess you want to talk about Stefanos,” Sascha says, if only to break the silence.

It’s been five days and the match has already been immortalised. Clips on Twitter, newspaper articles with phrases like _greatest ever_, and _dethroning the king_, and _end of an era_, like Stefanos murdered Roger out there, instead of hounding him for five long sets and taking his first grand slam from the greatest player in the world.

“I want to talk about Stefanos,” Roger says. He taps his cup with the pad of his finger. “You and him. You need to do something about it.”

Sascha almost drops his coffee.

“What?”

Roger is quite calm. “You need to tell him, Sascha. It’s not fair to him.”

“Tell him what?”

“How you feel about him.” Roger is fixing him with the same _are-you-stupid_ look he gave Denis Shapovalov when he asked where in Germany Switzerland was.

“How I-”

“I know it’s scary. _I _know it’s scary,” he adds. “You think I wasn’t a complete idiot to Rafa for ages before he finally made me get it together?”

Sascha bites his lip. He knows scraps of their story, pieced together from things Roger’s said, Rafa’s said, sarcastic jokes Mirka’s made. Things like how Roger was in love with Rafa for three years before finally kissing him. Things like how Roger wanted to wait until they retired until they came out, spend years hiding something so beautiful, so vital. Sascha was thirteen. A picture, outside a bar in London, the front page of _The Express_ (and then, in the following days, _Paris Match_, _Bild_, every magazine in the kiosk Sascha passed on his way to school), _Fed and Nadal in gay kiss scandal_. It still made him queasy, even though he’d been regaled with the entire wedding album, even though he’d seen how they’d come out the other side stronger, happier, an unshakeable team. The burning shame of it. The way his father’s face turns when he talks about them.

“I can’t,” Sascha says. “I’m not like you two. I can’t just-”

“Sascha.” Roger leans right forward and his eyes are dark and serious. “You _have_ to. You know that, don’t you? You have to do what you know is right.”

Sascha turns to look out the window and a leaf falls, one of the last few from the trees.

That night, late, almost tomorrow, Stef calls him. His finger pauses over his screen, but his indecision gets him and the phone rings out before he can answer it. There’s a _ping_ and he’s got a voicemail.

“_Hi, Sasch_.” Stef sounds tired, like he’s been on court all day. “_I’m just calling to let you know. Um. I thought you should be the first to know. The press release is going out at 8 AM tomorrow. London time. Uh. I’m retiring._” A clearing of the throat and perhaps Stef shifting position in his chair. “_From tennis, obviously. So. I thought you should, um. Anyway. Call me._”

Sascha puts down his phone, opens his laptop, puts on an episode of _Gilmore Girls_, and cries into the night.

***

Berlin’s winter bites. Sascha is standing directly under a drip, the queue on either side pinning him in place. There’s loud chatter in German, French, Spanish, Arabic. Two men stumble out of the line, holding each other, kissing down each other’s necks. Sascha hears their friends all yelling bawdy jokes in slurred voices. He’s been waiting for half an hour. If he had someone to stumble out of the queue with, he would.

But he’s alone.

It isn’t his flat. He has a friend, Tomasz, from middle school, who now works in the clubs as a promoter, and who has several apartments across Berlin for his manifold needs. When Sascha rang him up and said, _hey, I need to crash for a few days, and I need recommendations for clubs_, he hadn’t asked any questions. Just met him at the airport and handed him a set of keys and a few words of advice.

“The Box,” he said, “If you want a good night. Don’t bother trying to get into Berghain. The music’s not your thing and they won’t give a shit that you’re a famous athlete.”

The queue moves, eventually, and the bouncer’s Russian, so Sascha just has to say _dobrii vecher_ and _spassiba_ and he’s in.

It’s like being swallowed by a big cat, all heat and damp, and then flashing lights and pounding music. His whole body seems to rattle from it. He weaves his way through the crowd and finds his way to the dancefloor, and he doesn’t need to go to the bar, doesn’t need to get drunk. He can just let the music fill him up. Take over his mind. He doesn’t have to think. September seems so far away.

There’s a song so good it makes him want to never hear anything again. And there’s a girl dancing next to him. And then there’s a girl dancing with him. She’s pretty. He looks at her waist and her tits and her hair and thinks, yeah, I could, she’s what people would call pretty, so when she takes his hand and starts to walk away he follows.

There’s a pretty girl holding his hand. There’s a crowd he’s moving through. There’s a corridor. There’s a toilet cubicle. He knows what happens now. He pins her against the wall and she giggles, and he kisses her and she _hmm_s, and she _Stef’s hands Stef’s long fingers tangled in his hair_ kisses him back.

“You want to-” he starts to say, and then he’s trying to remember if he has a condom in his wallet, but she’s wriggling out of his grip and getting something out of her pocket. He stumbles back. Watches her. He can’t tell, for a long time, what’s going on, sees a flash of white and her fingers moving swiftly, and then he sees her get out a bank card and a twenty-euro note, and then he gets it.

“I,” he starts to say, and he was probably about to say something like _I’m a tennis player, sorry, I don’t do drugs_, but he doesn’t, and instead takes the rolled up note she offers him and leans down and inexpertly snorts a bump of cocaine.

“Ah,” he says, and she grins at him and follows suit.

When it hits him it’s like a subway train hurtling down a tunnel. The feeling lands square in the chest and it’s fireworks and cannonballs.

“Fuck,” he spits. “Fuck, Jesus, fuck.”

“Good, right?” she says, and he realises she’s Russian, and he’s speaking Russian, and aren’t there an awful lot of Russians out in Berlin tonight, and his hands feel weird, and he wants to go, wants to move, never wants to leave this toilet cubicle, wants to go to Munich, wants to go to the Bundestag and give them all what for, wants to go to Cuba, Cuba, Cuba Gooding Jr, maybe he could be an actor, a model, a tall guy like him, Russians, weren’t they speaking Russian-

“Shh, baby,” the pretty girl says and apparently he’s been saying all that out loud, because she puts a finger to his lips and he forgets everything in his head.

“My apartment isn’t far,” he says. “Ten minutes. Can you walk ten minutes?”

“I can walk ten minutes,” the pretty girl says _Stef’s dark eyes Stef’s smile the chocolate bunny_ and they leave hand in hand.

They don’t waste time. He feels like an animal. He feels like grabbing her. Throwing her around. He’s aching hard. She won’t stop touching him. They go to his bed. He pushes her down. She laughs. She’s grinning. He advances up the bed. Teeth sharp like a panther. Pulls his belt off. Fumbles his dick out. He pulls her top off and then her jeans. She isn’t wearing underwear. He sticks his hand blindly into his bedside drawer. Rolls a condom on.

“Just fuck me,” she gasps, as he begins to feel around between her thighs. He moves up. Moves her ankles around his waist.

_Usher out the tinny speakers of a car radio. _

_Stef is young and pale and too scared. Sascha is terrified too, but he’s older, and he wants Stef to know it, so he brazens it out and puts up a front. _

_“You hit good today,” Stef mutters in the car back._

_“Just speak Russian,” Sascha snaps._

_Ten years old. Dark eyes, happy gaps when he’s winning, twin abysses when he’s losing. _

_His one invariable factor. Stefanos. _

“If you’re not going to fuck me, I’ll just go back out. I’m not gonna waste my time.”

His dick’s gone soft and he’s lying to one side and he’s not having sex with the pretty girl. Her getting up and huffing and slamming the door behind her isn’t much of a surprise.

Sleep must come eventually. He wakes up at noon propped up in bed with the Playstation controller in his hands and a stiff neck. He didn’t even know Tomasz had one, but apparently Sascha played five straight hours of _Fifa_. He stumbles out of bed eventually, and eats the entire contents of Tomasz’s fridge. For several hours he feels like the inside of his body is curdling, and he lies on the sofa in front of MTV feeling very sorry for himself.

And then he gets on a flight back to Monte Carlo, arrives at his flat at midnight, and falls asleep with Lövik next to him in the bed.

“Get up.”

There is a very strange moment where Sascha thinks he’s twelve years old and late for school. He opens his eyes. He is not twelve. His father is standing over him.

“Get up,” he says again. “They’re here.”

“Who?” Sascha says. His mouth feels like sawdust. “Who’s here? What’s-” But his father is already striding out of the room without another word.

He didn’t tell any of them about his little holiday. He’d told Domi, just so someone knew, in case he got kidnapped and held for ransom, but as far as his family are concerned he’s just gone AWOL for a few days. He stands up. The room is spinning. He’s still coming down, it would seem. Not that he’s an expert. He googled it while waiting in the departure lounge. Flulike symptoms, check. Headache, check. Impending sense of doom, check. He pulls some clothes on and heads out.

When he sees them his mind goes blank. Because there’s no ambiguity about who it is and why. No potential for him to be mistaken. And when one of them, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, stands up and says, “Mr Zverev, we’re from the ITF, this is a spot drug test,” he almost feels relieved. It’s over, now. Finally, it’s over.

***

Stefanos moves out a week after his retirement is made official. He’d tried to put up with his parents and the crushing, silent disbelief and mourning they’re clearly going through. His father taking the kids down to the courts for practice and acting like he can’t talk to Stef about it, like _tennis_ has become a swear word suddenly. Or his mother making helpful suggestions about what he could do now. Go to film school, there’s a great course at this place in New York, or submit some of his writing to a magazine, or go and work at Patrick’s academy as a coach. Their pity and sadness is simply too much, especially since Stefanos has never felt happier in his life. He has a clear, vivid memory of being four years old and spending an entire afternoon at the playpark, on the swings, trying to go as high as he could, so he could see over the tops of the trees and up where the birds were. He feels like that, now. That unchained freedom. His life is in his own hands. It’s exhilarating.

He can’t stay in Monte Carlo. The whole city suddenly leaves a nasty taste in his mouth. The superyachts and palm trees and limousines, none of it’s real, it’s like living on a film set. He goes back to Greece. He doesn’t go back to Vouliagmeni but his new house- _his_ new house- is only half an hour down the coast. He wakes up every morning and looks out at the sea, copper and silver in the morning light, and drinks coffee out on the balcony.

He’s been there a week when, coffee half-done, and a little crocodile line of primary school children walking under his window, his phone buzzes.

_Tennis star Alexander Zverev in two-year drugs rap_, the news app blares. His heart plummets and he feels a little dizzy, but a part of him isn’t surprised, or even that sad. He sits back down at the rickety little table that came with the house and reads.

_Former world no. 3 Alexander Zverev has been hit with a two-year ban and a record fine of $250,000 after testing positive for cocaine. The German, who crashed out of this year’s US Open in a straight-set bloodbath in his quarter-final match against the Russian Karen Khachanov, has admitted to recreational use of the drug and has stated he will not be appealing the decision._

His father calls him that afternoon.

“You’ve seen the news,” he states, voice steady.

“Yeah,” Stef says. He’s out on the balcony again; it’s still warm enough to be out in shorts and t-shirts, and he’s brought a book he’s been meaning to read for ages.

“Have you called him?”

“Not yet.”

“Patrick wants to know if you’ll come and do a couple of weeks at the academy. He’s running clinics this month. He wants to see if you’d be suited to coaching there. A sort of trial, I guess.”

“Huh,” Stef says.

“What should I tell him?”

That Stef left his racquets, balls, kits, bandanas, all his trophies, all his medals, everything that might have possibly reminded him of being a tennis player, in a self-storage unit in Monte Carlo?

“Tell him I can’t,” Stef says. “There’s something I have to do.”

There’s a long silence on the other end. Then, “You might get your heart broken.”

“Yeah, I might.”

“It’ll be worth it. You don’t even know yet how much the pain is worth it.”

“You gave me a pretty good idea.”

His father sighs. “Stefanos, I’m- we- I know you weren’t-”

“Dad-”

“And I’m-”

“I know.”

“And whatever you do, as long as you give it your everything, we’ll support you. And we’re very, very proud of you.”

“Dad,” he says again. His voice wobbles and his eyes prickle with tears.

“I love you. You don’t even know a tenth of how much I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says.

“Now,” his father clears his throat, “Go and get him.”

_Come to Greece_.

That’s all the text says, the first in a week. Sascha reads it, again and again. Supine on his sofa. The TV blaring to drown out his own thoughts.

It abruptly stops, and Sascha’s grip loosens and his phone clatters to the floor, and there’s his dad, standing over him, the remote in his hand.

It’s been twelve hours since _Mr Zverev, we have detected the presence of cocaine in your blood and urine_, since Alexander walked out of Sascha’s apartment without a word, twelve hours since a human being has spoken to him.

“Press conference, tomorrow,” he says. “You will explain. You will apologise.”

“I-”

“And you will stand up when I speak to you, boy.” His voice is flat and calm and Sascha just wants to hide under a table and stick his fingers in his ears. “You will explain,” he says again. “You will explain to me why you have decided to throw your life away like this.” He folds his arms. “After all your mother and I have sacrificed. After all the hours we have worked for you. The kit, the equipment, the flights, everything we have bought for you. And you spit in our faces like this. _Why?_”

Sascha is about to open his mouth to try to say- well, he’s not even sure, something to delay the inevitable, to perhaps make it hurt less- but then his phone rings.

He’s a split-second too slow and his father scoops it up from the floor before him.

“Stefanos Tsitsipas,” his father reads.

“Papa, I-”

“Why is Stefanos Tsitsipas calling you?”

“I don’t-”

“_Why is that faggot calling you?_” And the yelling and the sound of his phone being thrown over his head against a wall, only suddenly, Sascha doesn’t feel like running away. Stef’s calling him. He feels tall. He feels taller than his father. He feels _brave_.

“I’m gay,” he says. The words feel like bubbles tickling his throat. “But you knew that already, right?”

“Alexander.”

“That’s what all this is, isn’t it? You think you can force me to be the person you want me to be. If you just try hard enough, I’ll end up a carbon copy of you. But that’s not how it works. I’m not like you.”

“Alexander,” his father says. His voice is cracking. “Alexander, you are not gay.”

“I am. You did a good job trying to convince me I wasn’t, but I am, and I don’t care if it bothers you.” That’s a lie. But it’s something approaching the truth, hopefully.

“Sascha- you’re confused, you’ve had a difficult season, with the illness, with everything, I know you might think, because Tsitsipas, because Federer and Nadal- I don’t know, I should never have let you spend so much time with them-”

“Papa.” Sascha stands tall. “I’m gay.”

His father’s face turns to steel. His jaw sets. “Then you are not my son.” And he turns and walks out of the apartment, and Sascha is alone.

His phone is cracked and the home screen button doesn’t work, but he manages to call Stef back.

“Hey,” Stef says, his voice on the other end muffled and a little out of breath, like he’s walking fast somewhere. “Sorry, did I catch you at a bad time before?”

“Sort of,” Sascha says. He slumps down against the wall and sits, with his limbs folded out in front of him. “It’s OK though.”

“OK. Um. So, can you?”

“Come to Greece?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I think I can. I don’t really have much else on at the moment.” He allows himself a laugh, and Stef joins him.

“No, me neither. I just, uh, I want to see you.”

“I want to see you too.”

“Well, then. I’ll text you my address.”

“I’ll book the flight.” Stef hangs up. Sascha puts his phone down.

Then he picks it up again and googles if they use euros in Greece.

His flight arrives late the following night. He had left without saying a word to any of them. He hadn’t known what to pack, so he took enough clothes for a week, his laptop, a book and his toothbrush, which he reckons will get him through most things.

The Uber driver drops him across the street and when he gets out it’s chilly, but there is still a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea, which _shush-shush_es behind him. He stands under the milky light of a lamppost for a moment, before crossing the street and going up to the door. There is a neat little label under the bell, in Stef’s scratchy handwriting, with _Tsitsipas_ in the Latin alphabet and presumably the same in Greek above. It looks new. Sascha rubs his hands together and runs them through his hair and hopes it looks OK, and that he doesn’t smell too gross from the plane, and then presses the bell. There’s the faint sound of it echoing through the house, and then a pause, and then footsteps, and then Stef opens the door, and they are face to face under the ink-black sky.

“Hi,” Stef says.

“Hi,” Sascha replies. “Um. I brought a coat. I don’t know how cold it gets in winter in Greece.”

(Because, of course, that was the most sensible thing to say. Sascha’s been here two minutes and he already wants to smash his head against a wall).

“A coat’s a good idea,” Stef says. “It can get cold.” His hair is longer, Sascha notices, and a little more messy, and then he realises it’s because he doesn’t have someone styling it every day. Because he’s not a tennis player any more.

“Come in,” Stef says after a moment. “You must be tired.”

Sascha follows him through the hall and into the sitting room, and notices every single detail in perfect clarity: Stef’s jackets on the hooks by a huge, ornate mirror, a shoe rack, stairs winding up into darkness. A coffee table stacked with books and magazines, trainers scattered around like Stef kicked them off and never tidied them away, a huge TV and an Xbox, and paintings and photo prints on the walls, some colourful abstract pieces, some black and white photos of children and trees and people entering coffee shops on New York streets.

“It’s a mess,” Stef says as they go in. Sascha hangs back in the doorway and looks right round. “Sorry. I just moved in. There’s a load of boxes in the kitchen that I still haven’t opened.”

“I like it,” Sascha says. “The decoration, I mean. It’s very, um. You.”

Stef gives a shy grin. Sascha tries to ignore the flutter in his chest.

“Thanks,” he says, “I’ll take that as compliment.”

“No trophies,” Sascha adds, unthinking. If Stef’s face falls, it’s only by a fraction, only for a second.

“No. I left them all in Monte Carlo. I think I’ll give them to my parents. They mean more to them than to me.”

“Oh,” Sascha says.

“Do you want a drink?” Stef says, “Or something to eat? Have you had dinner?”

“I ate on the plane. They did souvlaki. It was kind of gross.”

Stef laughs. “We don’t send our best chefs to work for Aegean Air. Can I get you anything else?”

“No, it’s fine, I, um.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Stef blusters. “It’s gone midnight, you must be tired.”

“It’s only eleven in Monte Carlo,” Sascha adds, and wonders why he even bothers opening his mouth.

Stef leads him upstairs and opens one of the doors on the landing.

“Spare room,” he announces, “Or one of them. There’s a bathroom with a shower and stuff. Do you have-”

“I brought my toothbrush and that’s pretty much it.”

“I got stuff. For you, I mean. In case you forgot something. So there’s everything in the cupboards.”

“Thanks.”

Sascha thinks this might be about as awkward a conversation as he’s ever had, but he’s exhausted, so when Stef shuts the door behind him, he simply brushes his teeth, washes his face and falls gratefully into bed.

He thinks, as he drifts off to sleep, that if Stef didn’t have a spare room, he wouldn’t mind that too much either, but that asking now would just be odd.

He wakes at seven on the dot without an alarm. The sun streams in through the window- there’s a blind, but he’d forgotten to close it apparently- and lights up the room in dazzling white. He gets up and looks out. Below is the grey ribbon of the street running round a tight bend either side, and then, over the roofs of the houses on the other side, is the sea, blue and clear and inviting. It’s astonishing. For a moment his head is clear of all thoughts, the whirring chainsaw voice shutting up for a second. He looks around. On the dressing table, a flash of gold foil. He hadn’t noticed it last night: the Lindt bunny, still wrapped up. He turns away.

When he goes downstairs, Stef is already up and dressed. The kitchen is indeed cramped with piles of cardboard boxes. Sascha picks his way around them and sees Stef assembling a bowl of granola. Great big scoops of yoghurt from a huge tub and fresh raspberries. That shit souvlaki seems a long way away.

“Morning,” Stef says brightly. “Did you sleep OK?”

Sascha wants to say that it was the best night’s sleep he’s had in months, but that’s a bit much, this early, so he just says, “Yeah,” and sits down at the bar. His feet dangle from the stool and he leans his elbows on the cool granite. When Stef turns to retrieve something from the fridge Sascha can see his shoulder blades expand, his broad back, the olive skin below the sleeves of his t-shirt.

“Have you ever been camping?” Stef says as he pours from a huge jug of milk into the fancy-looking coffee machine on the side.

“I went with the Cub Scouts,” Sascha says, then blushes fiercely when Stef smirks at him. “I was eight, Mischa did it, it looked cool-”

“Hey, no judgement,” Stef holds his hands up and grins. “I was patrol leader in the 15th Vouliagmeni troop for five years. It _was_ cool, we learnt how to whittle.”

Sascha snorts. Stef hands him a mug of coffee from the machine and then makes one for himself. His hands curl round the blue ceramic. Sascha looks away.

“So that’s the only time you’ve ever been camping?”

“Yep.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I dunno.” Sascha takes a sip of the coffee. It’s delicious and also scalds the roof of his mouth, which is just how he likes it. “I was eight. Philip Weiss brought three bags of gummy worms and we all made ourselves sick, but I think other than that I enjoyed it.”

“Do you want to do it again?”

“Camping?”  
“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“There’s an island my dad used to take us to. It’s tiny, hardly anyone lives there, there’s just a little monastery and some shepherds. There’s beaches but there’s also these beautiful cliffs and a forest, and, um.” Stef trails off and looks embarrassed. His eyes had gone foggy and his voice a little slower. Sascha wants him to keep talking. To never stop.

“That sounds good,” Sascha says. “Is there a campsite?”

Stef smiles indulgently. “No, there’s barely a harbour. It’s the middle of nowhere, it’s amazing. It’s near Santorini, though,” he adds hastily. “We won’t die or anything.”

“OK,” Sascha says.

“OK?”

“OK.”

“Four days?” Stef says. He hops up on the bar and Sascha is aware, painfully so, of him just next to him.

“Huh?”

“We leave today, come back on Monday?”

“Today?”

“Why not?” Stef shrugs. “It’s a ferry to Santorini and then you call the monastery and one of the monks rows you over.”

A lot of questions spring up all at once and Sascha is momentarily flummoxed.

“What about my phone?” he says eventually.

Stef shrugs again. “What _about_ your phone?”

“How will I charge it? If we’re camping, I mean. And there’s no campsite.”

“You won’t. I’m leaving mine here.”

“But what if someone needs to call me?”

“They won’t be able to,” Stef intones, like Sascha is very stupid.

“But then- what- what if-”

“Does anyone urgently need to call you in the next four days? Are you waiting to see if you got into law school?”

Sascha scowls. “All right then, what if I need to call someone? What if one of us gets hurt? What if I go swimming in the sea and I drown?”

“Do you have your five-metre badge? Or did you not stay in the Cub Scouts long enough?”

“Stef,” Sascha says.

“What if you go and none of that happens and you have a good time? Have you ever, in your life, gone into anything thinking you’ll enjoy yourself?”

Which hits a bit too close to home, so Sascha scowls even more and folds his arms. He realises he looks like a grumpy child, but who cares, he basically is, and he shouldn’t be expected to trust someone who takes off on holidays with no notice.

“If anything happens,” Stef says gently, “The monks have a medical room in the monastery, or they’ll row us back to Santorini. But nothing’s going to happen. I promise.”

I promise.

_I promise_.

“Fine,” Sascha says, because fuck it, how much worse can his life get now?

“Call Mischa,” Stef says. “Tell him you’re going away for a few days. Would that make you feel better?”

Sascha nods, and goes out into the hall.

He closes the door behind him and dials Mischa’s number.

“Hey, kiddo.” Mischa picks up after two rings, and sounds tired.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?”

Sascha takes a deep breath. “I’m in Greece. I’m at Stefanos Tsitsipas’ house.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah.” There’s a stack of empty cardboard boxes that reaches his waist, and he worries the corner of one of them with his thumb and forefinger while he speaks. “We’re going away for a few days, and I won’t have my phone, so I’m just calling you to tell you. So if I haven’t texted you or something by Monday, um, send out a search party or something.”

“OK,” Mischa says. “I’ll do that. Do you want me to tell mum and dad?”

“If you want,” Sascha says. “I don’t really care what they think any more.”

“Dad said you…” Sascha can hear him clear his throat. “You told him you’re gay.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m really sorry.” Mischa’s voice cracks.

“Why?”

“I’m sorry I was such a shit big brother. You should have felt able to tell me. I should have- Sascha, I should have been able to protect you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from him.”

Sascha knows if he opens his mouth he’ll start bawling so he settles for making a vague ‘nnmm’ grunt.

“Anyway. Um. I’ll let you go.”

“Nnn,” Sascha replies. He hangs up and pinches the bridge of his nose to stop himself from crying, then goes back into the kitchen.

“Ready?” Stef says.

“Ready.”

The ferry to Santorini takes hours, and Sascha is queasy for most of it. He sits at the front of the ship- it’s too cold to be out on deck, as much as he’d like to- and stares out of the window. Stef sits by his side. It’s a little unnerving. Stef isn’t saying anything: any attempts at conversation just make Sascha more nauseated and he soon shuts up, and Stef follows his lead. Instead they sit together and look out at the sea and the sky.

“I’ll get you something,” Stef says at one point. Sascha tries to protest that he’s not hungry, but Stef is already marching away towards the poky little shop behind them. Watching him for too long makes his stomach turn so he goes back to the window. When Stef returns, he’s holding a glass bottle and a little pack of biscuits.

“Ginger beer,” he announces, “And ginger biscuits. Not quite as good as mama’s, but they should help.”

Sascha takes them, and they do help, and Stef sits just as quietly as before. And then he thinks about Madrid. Stef lying next to him. The weight of his body on the bed. The bottle is cool and damp in his hands.

They’ve packed two big backpacks and when they file off the ferry they look like everyone else. No one gives them a second glance. Not even Stef, in his home country, the first Greek grand slam winner. It’s odd. It’s nice.

The crowd heads off in one direction at the dock, out into the city centre, but Stef leads them down along the coast, at least a mile. It’s late October but the sun is high and bright. Sascha sweats and follows Stef in silence.

“Here,” he finally announces, when it feels like they’ve walked to the very end of the harbour and beyond. There’s a tiny wooden jetty with a booth at their end. Inside, a plump man with leathery skin puffs on a cigarette and reads a lurid-looking magazine.

“Here?” Sascha replies. Stef steps forward and taps politely on the glass, and when the man ignores him, taps again, less politely. They exchange words in Greek and the man rolls his eyes but nods and dials a phone, and Stef seems satisfied.

“Half an hour,” he says.

“For the monk?”

“Yeah.”

_The monk_, Sascha thinks. Three days ago, he was in a club in Berlin doing coke. Now he’s watching Stef settle on a bench, fold his arms over his chest, and lie back. In Greece. Waiting for a monk.

Sascha watches the horizon. A black dot becomes a black blob. That becomes the outline of a boat, which becomes the outline of a figure rowing a boat. Then he can make out a man wearing a black cloak, and then the boat pulls up, and the monk and the man in the booth are mooring it to a post.

“That’s us,” Stef says. Sascha wants to say something sarcastic, but he doesn’t, and wonders why.

They approach the boat. The monk stands on the jetty. He is head-to-toe in black and looks a bit like a crow, and has a huge long beard and very intense eyes, and quite frankly Sascha is terrified, but Stef doesn’t seem fazed in the slightest.

“Do you speak English?” Sascha ventures. The monk blinks at him and then says something softly to Stef in Greek. Clearly not. Stef piles their bags onto the boat, and then the monk follows, and Stef holds his arm as he gets on as well, and then turns and extends his hand to Sascha, who takes it, but it’s just a friendly hand, to get him onto the boat, and not even the monk is raising an eyebrow.

They row away. Santorini slips away behind them. No going back.

The monk rows with even strokes. It looks tiring, and Sascha wonders how he isn’t cooking himself alive in the cloak.

“You’ve met a lot of monks,” Sascha says.

Stef shrugs. “I’m Greek Orthodox. You’re Catholic, are you saying you’re freaked out by nuns?”

“Catholic nuns and Orthodox monks are very different,” Sascha says. Stef nods sagely. “I mean, this guy’s dressed like Darth Vader.”

Stef swats him on the arm. “Shh,” he hisses, “He’ll know you’re talking about him.”

The monk abruptly says something in Greek, startling them both.

“He wants to know where you’re from,” Stef says.

“Oh. Hamburg.” He shakes his head and turns to the monk when he realises his mistake. “Sorry. Uh, Hamburg.”

“Hem-berk,” the monk repeats.

“_Amvourgo_,” Stef says, “_Germania_.”

The monk’s face opens up in recognition. He and Stef chat a little more in Greek. Sascha wonders what the monk thinks of them, if he thinks they’re friends or what.

It takes another half an hour of seasickness but they arrive just as the sun is falling behind the trees on the crest of the island. The beach they land on is painted in grey and pastel yellow in the fading light.

“We’re eating at the monastery,” Stef says. “And then we’ll pitch camp. Does that sound OK?”

Sascha nods. It’s not like he has another plan. He’s bone-tired, he realises, as he follows Stef and the monk up the hill.

The monastery is small and dusty and smells of incense. Their food is delivered to them by a different monk, into a tiny little side-room off the monks’ refectory.

“Are we not eating with them?” Sascha says, when they’re alone.

“No, we’re not monks,” Stef replies, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“So we’re going to eat three meals a day in this tiny room.”

“It takes a bit of getting used to,” he says, “But there’s a reason why this is one of my favourite places on earth.”

“You came here with your dad,” Sascha says.

“Yeah.”

Sascha wants to say something about the family holidays they had growing up. Always a resort with a tennis court, always at least an hour of hitting with Mischa every day, except when they would go back to see family in Russia, when it would be running in the snow in the early morning, _like I used to do, every day, boy, and look at me_. Never really a holiday. Not truly. He doesn’t, though.

Stef says his goodbyes and thank you’s in Greek to the monks, and as they leave, he does a complicated series of movements in front of an icon.

“What’s that in aid of?” Sascha says. They walk down the path past the monastery in the last glimmers of light.

“It’s just good manners,” Stef says. “Do you know how to pitch a tent?”

There’s a flash of bravado, suddenly, like Sascha has to say _of course, how hard can it be_, but it passes.

“No,” he admits, “It’s been years.”

They’ve reached a clearing, a flat patch of ground in the middle of some trees. Stef puts his backpack down.

“I’ll show you, then.”

And he does. Step by patient step. The groundsheet, then the poles, then the fabric stretched over them, the pegs hammered into the soft soil with a rock, the ropes wrapped round them. Sascha fucks up early on, fastening the wrong pole in the wrong way, and when Stef puts his hand on his wrist to stop him, he flinches, waits for the yelling.

“Like this,” Stef says instead. He unties the pole and shows Sascha where it should go, and how to fix it. His voice is soft. He isn’t yelling. He isn’t pushing Sascha aside. He isn’t saying _I don’t know why I bother, useless, just stay out of my way_.

They stand back to look at the finished result and a lump rises in Sascha’s throat.

“Not bad,” Stef says. “It might even stay up.”

They brush their teeth and spit into the bushes and pee up against a tree and it all feels very wild and Bear Grylls-ish. Then Stef pulls a pile of blankets out of his backpack and goes into the tent to arrange them, and that’s when Sascha realises that they haven’t brought sleeping bags.

Stef sticks his head out of the tent flap. “Are you coming?”

Sascha stands gingerly to one side, but there’s not much he can do. He crawls in after Stef and there they are, under the blankets. Stef has hung a torch from the ceiling pole. They lie side-by-side, several inches of space separating them.

“Goodnight,” Sascha says after a moment. It feels- odd. Like all of a sudden he’s realised this is a bad idea. Stef doesn’t seem to think so.

“Night,” he says, and turns off the torch, and lies down.

Sascha shuts his eyes. When he opens them next he’s back there, in the airing cupboard. There’s a storm outside. There’s the sound of crack and thunder and then the booming footsteps of the bear as it approaches.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorryI’msorryI’msorry-”

Hands wrapped around his throat. Too hot, too hot. Coming closer. Seconds left.

“Sascha,” says the bear. “Sascha.”

And then it isn’t the bear. It’s a new voice. Calling his name. _Sascha_.

“Sascha.”

It’s Stefanos. They’re lying on their sides facing each other. Stef’s eyes are wide with concern.

“Sascha,” he says again, “Are you OK?”

Sascha blinks and sits up and brushes his head against the roof of the tent. The tent. Stef’s switched the torch on, he realises, and he looks around at the nest of blankets and the green fabric of the tent. They’re in a tent. They’re on an island. They’re in Greece.

“What time is it?” he says. His mouth is dry.

“I don’t know,” Stef says. “But it’s still dark.”

“Oh,” Sascha says. Not knowing what time it is feels strangely freeing.

“Are you OK?”

“Hnn.”

“You were crying out in your sleep.”

“I was having a bad dream.” Sascha lies back down next to Stefanos. He feels clammy and too hot but he can’t take his t-shirt off, obviously.

“About your dad?”

Sascha says nothing.

“Because you were saying-” Stef seems to catch himself. “You were saying _papa_.”

“Yeah.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to. But are you OK?”

“I’m OK,” Sascha says, and he is. Genuinely. He thinks if he shut his eyes he’d fall asleep straight away. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“Later,” Stefanos repeats. He switches off the torch and they lie in silence, and then Stef curls round him and wraps his arms round him and Sascha, slowly, tentatively, responds in kind. Then they are tangled together. Holding each other. Sascha can feel Stef’s slow breathing and his heartbeat and his warmth. He shuts his eyes.

It’s early when they wake. It must be, because it’s still cold and there is dew on the grass. Sascha wakes to a peal of bells ringing bright and long in the morning.

“Breakfast time,” Stef says into his neck. His breath is warm and hot and Sascha is acutely aware that he’s woken up with a hardon and if he presses his hips a little further in Stef would be able to feel it. Instead, Stef wriggles out of his grip and sits up.

“They have a shower at the monastery,” he announces. “They didn’t used to. When we were little we’d have to wash in the sea.”

“Cold,” Sascha remarks. His mouth feels less dry and sticky. He feels well-rested. Ready.

“It was fun. Still, I’d prefer a shower, any day. C’mon.”

And so they go up to the monastery again, and another cloaked monk silently admits them. They eat buttered toast and dates and hot coffee in silence while, next door, the monks chant their morning prayers. It’s a low, indistinguishable hum. Stefanos lets him go first in the shower. It’s a tiny little cubicle at the end of a corridor and it’s on a timer like at the public swimming pools back in Hamburg and it’s only a little warmer than freezing, but he feels better for it.

“What now?” he says, when the monk closes the door behind them and they stand at the crest of the hill. Stef shuts his eyes momentarily and Sascha wants to know what’s going on in his head.

“We’ll walk,” he says finally, “And then it’ll be lunchtime, and after lunch, we’ll borrow some fishing rods and go fishing.”

“Are you any good at fishing?”

“Hopeless,” Stef says cheerily, “I’ve never caught a single thing.”

They set off into the woods. Stef seems to know his way perfectly, and Sascha isn’t too worried about getting lost, if he can keep the sharp smell of the sea in his nose. They talk. Stef tells him about how his dad has been bringing them here as long as Stef can remember, and that his dad before him took him. That this was where he learnt to swim, and then where he taught Pavlos and Elisavet when he was older. That the monks know the family by name, but they don’t know Sascha, so they’re being a little stand-offish because they don’t trust him yet.

“You make them sound like stray cats,” Sascha says.

“They sort of are. I dunno. I guess if you spend your entire life with the same twenty people and no one else, meeting someone new is a little difficult.”

Sascha thinks, then, of how carefully his parents would vet his friends. They had to be tennis players, of course, but they had to be _good_ tennis players. Dominic and Andrey and Karen and people like that were all people he liked, of course, but they were also people his parents approved of.

Stef tells him about how his mother tells everyone he was born with his arm up in the air, fist clenched, like he was about to serve. Tells him about how angry he was when his mum told him she was pregnant with Petros, and how angry Petros was when Pavlos came along, and how all three of them were delighted when the ultrasound picture of Elisavet was pinned up on the fridge because they finally had a little sister, a girl for their make believe games, so they didn’t have to do rock-paper-scissors to decide who would be playing the princess.

And Sascha, word by word, Stef gently prodding but somehow knowing when to retreat, starts to talk too. He talks about his earliest memory, of leaning on Mischa’s two big ten-year-old hands as they toddled down the garden with halting steps. Of his first day at primary school, and his teacher saying _another Zverev, my word, here comes trouble_, and everyone making fun of him because he would speak Russian if he couldn’t remember a word in German. _Are you Russian or German_, people would say. When he was eleven and the World Cup was on and Hamburg was flooded with tourists, even his teachers would say _are you German or are you Russian?_ And for a long time he’d been saying _both, why can’t I be both_, but no one accepted that as an answer, so he’d say Germany at school and Russia at home. Only one day he came home and Marty Werner had drawn German flags on his cheeks in felt tip. His father asked him just what he thought he was playing at and he’d tried to explain but it hadn’t worked and he’d been made to scrub them off, his father standing behind him at the bathroom sink, glaring until his cheeks were clean.

Stef listens. When Sascha’s done he reaches over and takes his hand. They lace their fingers and Stef squeezes. Sascha feels safe. He smiles but not in Stef’s direction, not so Stef can see it.

The sun rises high above them and their shadows grow short. The bells ring out from the monastery again and they go in to eat.

Afterwards, they sit by the sea and Stef plants the fishing rod in the ground.

“Do you think we’ll catch anything?” Sascha says. He lies down next to Stef. He bundles a jumper under his head for a pillow, and with the gentle afternoon heat and a full stomach he feels pleasantly sleepy.

“No, probably not,” Stef replies.

He wakes up to Stef clicking his tongue in annoyance. He sits up. Stef is hunched over. He’s cradling one hand in the other. There is no wind.

“What’s the matter?” he says softly.

“Cut my finger on the line.” Sascha peers over his shoulder and sees the little bloom of blood below the nail on his index finger. Stef puts his finger in his mouth and frowns out at the sea.

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “It’s not that bad, look.” He holds his hand out and Sascha can see that it’s only a little scratch. Still, he shivers. “Go back to sleep.”

“Here.” Sascha takes his hand and kisses the tip of his injured finger, then holds it in his lap, both his hands wrapped around Stef’s.

“Were you with Nick Kyrgios?” Sascha says.

“Yeah,” Stef says. “But we broke up. Or- I don’t know. I don’t think it was ever serious enough to earn a break-up. We’re not together any more, that’s all I know.”

“Did you love him?”

Sascha can feel rather than hear Stef’s deep breath.

“No,” he says. “I liked him a lot, but it was never anything very deep. He knew that too.”

Sascha nods. “How long were you…”

“Since I was eighteen.”

“That’s a long time.”

Stef shrugs. “It didn’t feel like a long time. We never really talked except when we…”

“Oh.”

“What about you?”

“Hm?”

“Have you ever been in love?”

Sascha shrugs. “There were a couple of girls at school. And then Olya, obviously. But I don’t think I was in love with any of them.”

“What about boys?”

“No. No boys.” And then Sascha thinks. Because there were, really, all his best friends at school, who he’d play football with at breaktime and whose houses he’d have sleepovers at. Before tennis became his life and he still had time for stuff like that. They’d playfight and run races in the park and tackle each other to the ground. And Sascha loved it, the feeling of their weight and their skin and their hot breath, and he’d slope off into the showers at the rec field or in the changing rooms at school and bite his fist to stop himself from crying out as he jerked off down the drain. But didn’t everyone do that? Probably not, he realises. “Maybe, actually. Um. But nothing…You’re the first guy who ever…”

Stef pulls his injured hand free and runs his fingers through Sascha’s hair. He rubs his scalp and the nape of his neck. It feels so good Sascha wants to cry so instead he shuffles away so Stef can’t reach him.

“I told my dad,” he announces to the branches of the trees above him.

“That you’re gay?” Stef replies.

“Yeah.”

“How did it go?”

Sascha says nothing.

“Sascha.” Stef turns to him. Sascha can see it out of the corner of his eye but he refuses to look anywhere but straight up. “Sascha, those bruises on your chest.”

“It was him,” he blurts out. He can’t take it back now. He can’t unsay it, can’t ever grab the words from the air and make Stefanos not hear them.

Stefanos says nothing but pulls him closer again, even though Sascha wriggled away the last time, even though he keeps trying to push him away. They sit for the rest of the afternoon like that. Time slows to syrup and his mind is quiet.

They eat dinner in thoughtful silence and when they leave the inky sky is speckled with stars. Stefanos takes his hand and leads him down the path and they curl up around each other again in bed. Stef smells different, but right, and it’s only just as he’s drifting off to sleep that Sascha realises. He smells the way he did when they were ten, when he was still too young to smell of anything other than himself and his mother’s laundry detergent. No aftershave or hair product or even shampoo. Just Stefanos. He buries his face in Stef’s neck and breathes it in and he doesn’t even feel self-conscious about it. Stef hums happily, and Sascha can’t tell if he’s asleep.

_Two things happened on one day. He lost the Orange Bowl under-twelves and he met Stefanos Tsitsipas. _

_He got to the final- Stef made the semis, which happened earlier in the day- and then lost to some Italian who promptly decided professional tennis wasn’t for him and dropped off the face of the earth. When Sascha overheard his father saying that, later, to Mischa, it made his blood boil, because_ that should have been his trophy_, another one to put on the shelf in his room. Anyway: he lost that day, 6-4, 6-3, an annoying score. His skin started to itch around the fifth game of the first set, and by the ninth game of the second, a break down, staring defeat’s humiliation in the eye, he was a tightly-coiled spring. _

Game, set and match_\- somebody else. He harrumphed over to the net and gave a cursory slap to his opponent’s outstretched hand, and then to the umpire, and dragged himself over to his bench. He lifted his racquet above his head without even thinking. _

_“Stop.”_

_It was Russian, but it wasn’t his father. His father was all the way on the other side of the court, locked in discussion with Mischa. It was some little kid, blond-haired and freckly and wearing a stupid pair of capri pants like he thought he was Rafa Nadal or something. _

_“Don’t give him the satisfaction,” said the kid, and placed a hand on Sascha’s arm._

_Sascha snatched his arm away. “What?”_

_“He’s won, don’t let him see he’s beat you. Trust me, you’ll feel better.”_

_Sascha hadn’t known what the kid meant but the urge to smash something had evaporated and now he only felt a mild irritation that he was being told what to do by someone so scrawny and young. Parents and coaches and teachers were filing out of the court. The trophy ceremony was pretty underwhelming: the Italian guy got a little gold trophy and a big bar of chocolate, and Sascha got the tournament director ruffling his hair as he passed. _

_“Stefanos,” someone called from far away. The kid turned and looked. _

_“That’s mama. I gotta go. I think we’re hitting together, later. Not here, though. You’re at the Ramada, right?”_

_“Yeah.” The room Sascha shared with Mischa at the Ramada was pokey and there was some kind of black gunk lining the floor of the shower, but the hotel had a tennis court._

_“OK. Well, I think your mama talked to my mama, so I guess I’ll see you later.”_

_Only later didn’t come, at least, not how it was supposed to. They were going to the same hotel, so the tournament put them in the same taxi, them and a bunch of other kids, including Andrey, who offered Sascha alternate sips of his bottle of Sunny Delight. But then Stef sat down next to him on the other side of the bench seat, and Sascha had felt a weird prickling at the back of his neck._

_“How come you speak Russian?” he’d said. Andrey gave him a dead arm and he swore in English. _

_“You can’t ask people why they speak Russian,” Andrey hissed, “It’s rude.”_

_And Stefanos had shut up and looked out the window and so had Sascha and the driver turned up the radio to drown out the sound of the rest of the kids. _

“_Such_ _a tune,” one of the older kids had yelled when the song started. The radio was turned up even louder- too loud._ ‘Cause baby tonight/The DJ got us fallin’ in love again.

_Sascha glanced over at Stef. He was jiggling his knee and still staring determinedly out the window. Maybe he was about to puke. _

_When he got back to his room he asked his dad if he should bother taking a shower if he was just going to go back on the court after dinner. _

_“What do you mean?” Alexander said. _

_“Some kid, uh, Stef-a-nos, said mama arranged for us to hit tonight.”_

_“Oh, you mean Tsitsipas.” Alexander’s face clouded over. “No, you won’t be hitting with him. Get in the shower.”_

_And at the time Sascha hadn’t thought to ask why. He was eleven. His parents’ word was law. Maybe Stefanos was too Greek, or insufficiently Russian, or too short, or too young, or too thin. There was no way of knowing, now. _

Whatever, _Sascha thought at dinner that night,_ I’ll probably never see the guy again.

His eyes snap open. He is pressed against Stefanos’ broad back. He must have taken his shirt off in the night. His skin, now, is an even brown, only the slightest difference above the line of his t-shirt, his tennis tan fading every day. There are freckles on his back and Sascha traces them. First with his eyes and then with an outstretched fingertip. He feels the muscles on Stef’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulder blades. That there is strength and power there, but no violence: he marvels. He leans forward and buried his nose in Stef’s curls and they smell like home. Warm and gold and soft. Then he sits up. He crawls out of the tent as quietly as he can. It is still grey outside. Not yet dawn’s first blush. He pulls on his shoes and a jacket and follows the path down, down, down to the beach. He sits on the sand. He waits.

Stef wakes up when Sascha’s absence filters through his subconscious. He rolls over and Sascha’s side of the blanket is still warm.

He finds Sascha on the beach. He sits down next to him. The sun climbs the horizon. The world wakes up.

“I’m not going back,” Sascha says. “To Monte Carlo. Or to tennis. I’m done.”

“OK,” Stef says.

“My whole life has been- my dad, and tennis, and everything he’s wanted from me. And I always said to myself I’d get a grand slam and then he’d be happy, then I could stop. But I know now, even if I won more slams than Roger, even if I won every trophy they have, even if they invented a new one just for me- he still wouldn’t be happy. And that’s not my problem. Not any more.”

Stef’s heart sings and he doesn’t know how to put it into words so he doesn’t. Instead he strokes Sascha’s cheek with the back of his hand and then, soft as he can, kisses him. For the first time, it feels like a kiss between equals. Sascha kisses him back. They grip each other tight, _I won’t let go if you won’t_, and it’s fierce and gentle and it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful.

Stef stands up and holds his hand out and pulls Sascha to his feet. They walk entwined back to the tent and they lie down together and then they are tangled again, in blankets and each other.

Stef’s hand brushes up under Sascha’s shirt and he stills.

“Stefanos,” he whispers.

“Sorry,” Stef says. “Sorry, I don’t want to push you. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” he says. “But you’re going to see the bruises and-”

“I don’t care.”

“When they’re healing, they look worse. They’re all yellow and green. I just don’t want you to think it’s that bad.”

And Stef wants to say _but it is that bad_. In fact, he wants to take the next flight to Monte Carlo and close his hands around Alexander Zverev Sr.’s throat and squeeze the life out of him. Instead, he pulls Sascha’s shirt up and over his head. It is bad, as bad as Sascha said, a horrible collage of sickly colours. He tries not to wince. He bends his head down and kisses him all over, his chest and his torso and the patches on his arms. Over and over. Kisses and licks at all the ugliness someone else gave this beautiful boy.

“No one,” he intones, “Is ever going to hurt you like this again.”

“Stefanos-”

“I promise. I promise.”

“I love you,” Sascha says.

“I love you too.” It feels like a gift. He kisses Sascha again, first on the mouth and then the neck and then trailing down light touches to his nipples and Sascha hitches in a breath.

“Please,” he sighs. Stef palms lightly at the tent in the front of Sascha’s shorts and feels how hard he is.

“I want you,” he says. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”

“You’ve got me.”

So he takes him. He pulls Sascha’s cock free, long and slightly curved and already with a bead of precum on the end. He strokes it once, twice, slowly. Sascha’s breath hitches. Stef grins to himself. He pulls Sascha’s shorts all the way down and off. There he is, naked and spread out before him.

“You’re so beautiful,” Stef says. He kisses the smooth line of his stomach, then down, plants gentle kisses on the inside of his thighs.

“Stefanos,” Sascha breathes.

“You like that?” He leans down again and kisses the soft skin there. It’s pale and the hair on his legs is light, and then there is the dark thatch of hair around the base of his cock.

“Please,” Sascha says. His voice is half an octave higher. Stef’s kisses turn to nibbles. Just soft ones, barely hard enough to leave a mark, but the grazing of his teeth over Sascha’s skin makes him gasp.

“Please, Stefanos,” Sascha says again. His voice sounds desperate. Stef thinks he’ll bear that in mind, that Sascha enjoys being teased, that it makes his voice do that. He also won’t deny that it’s flattering that just the merest bit of it has left Sascha quite wanton. His cock is now leaking precum in thick drops and it’s irresistible, so Stefanos laps at his slit and tastes it. It’s clear and empty, like rain, and there’s that wonderful, deep _man_ smell. He takes Sascha fully in his mouth. The head grazes the back of his throat.

“Fuck- _fuck_, Stef-” Sascha gasps. Stef feels his fingers twist into his curls, just the slightest tug on his scalp. He presses Sascha’s hips down and begins to move. He works up and down the shaft in slow, generous gestures. More precum spills onto his tongue and Sascha begins to whine.

“Please, Stef, fuck, _fuck_, that feels so good, your mouth is so good.” Stef’s pretty sure Sascha isn’t aware of what he’s saying by this point. He hollows his cheeks, speeds up, presses soft little kisses up and down Sascha’s length.

“Stef,” Sascha chokes out, “I don’t wanna come yet.”

Stef pulls off. Sascha’s chest rises and falls in shallow breaths. The tent is hot and Stef can feel warmth radiating off Sascha’s cheeks.

“Let me- I think you’ll like this,” he says. He pulls his shirt over his head and chucks it to one side. He’s about to strip down completely but Sascha distracts him by running hungry, greedy hands over his chest.

“All mine,” he murmurs, seemingly to himself. Stef leans down and kisses him, feels the warm soft hair at his temple.

“All yours,” he replies. Then he sits back and pulls his pyjama shorts off. Finally they are both naked, completely exposed and vulnerable before each other. Sascha is staring at Stef’s cock, which is aching hard, an arrow between Stef’s thighs. His hand slides down Stef’s front to trace his happy trail.

“Can I?” he whispers, and Stef nods, and Sascha takes him in his hand. He gives him a few tentative strokes and his fingers are rough and calloused and warm and Stef tips his head back and sighs.

“Sascha,” he whispers, “Fuck, we should have done this sooner.” He takes Sascha’s hand and kisses his palm, and then leans down so they’re pressed closer together. Then he wraps Sascha’s hand round them both, their precum sliding between them, and begins to grind on him. Sascha moans from the bottom of his chest. It’s the loudest noise he’s made so far and it’s wonderful, the most beautiful sound.

“Told you you’d like it,” Stef whispers into his ear. They’re pressed up right against each other and Stef can feel every electric sensation of pleasure as the sensitive spot on the underside of the head meets Sascha’s soft, hot skin. They grind like that for what feels like hours. All Stef can hear is deep, animal moaning, and he can’t tell which is his and which is Sascha’s, but he can feel Sascha’s hot breath on his neck, his free hand roaming up and down his back.

“I love you I love you-” Stef nuzzles into Sascha’s neck- another thick drop of precum blurts from his dick, softer and softer and harder and harder, faster and faster, more desperate, a stuttering rhythm falling off beat- closer and closer, Sascha’s louder now, clawing at Stef’s back-

They come almost simultaneously. It shivers through Stef, white hot, he cries out, and Sascha joins him, and there’s a spit of cum between them, and _fuck-fuck-fuck_ it’s amazing, it’s better than anything he’s had before, it’s perfect, it’s heaven, he’s so, _so_ in love.

When Stef returns to earth he has collapsed on Sascha and they are draped in a sticky, sweaty heap. He rolls over a little to try to extricate himself. But Sascha holds on and buries his face in Stef’s chest and Stef could have sworn Sascha said _don’t go_, so he doesn’t. He shuts his eyes and all he can smell is Sascha and sex and there’s the blank whisper of the sea as he falls asleep.

He doesn’t dream.

Neither does Sascha.

***

“Sasch?”

Sascha is duct-taping a box of books shut when he hears Mischa’s voice. He looks up. He’s standing at the door of his apartment, Junior balanced on his hip.

“Misch.”

“You’re back from Greece, then,” Mischa says.

“Yeah.” Sascha uncaps the sharpie with his teeth and scrawls _books_ on the box in his shitty Russian cursive.

“Did you have a good time?”

“It was…” Sascha straightens up and pauses. “It was great.”

“And you and Tsitsipas are-”

“Yeah. We’re- he’s-” Sascha blushes so hard he can feel it and bends down again to shove the box to one side.

“I should get used to calling him Stefanos then, huh?” Mischa is grinning ear-to-ear and it fills Sascha’s heart up with love. But he also wants to cry. “You’re moving,” Mischa goes on.

“Yeah. Stef’s place in Athens.”

“You’re moving in with him?” Junior sticks his fingers in his mouth with an equally quizzical look as his father.

“It’s less that I’m moving in with him, more that I’m moving out of here.” Sascha doesn’t have another box to hand so he’s forced to stand looking at Mischa.

“Oh,” Mischa says. “I get that. Have you talked to them?”

Sascha shakes his head. “I will before I go. But, um. I want to put some space between us, you know? For the time being, anyway.”

“That seems fair,” Mischa says, a little sadly. “I’m sorry I-”

“You’ve already said,” Sascha says. “And you’ve got nothing to be sorry for. You were-” he blinks back tears, “You _are_ the best older brother I could have asked for.”

Mischa doesn’t say anything to that so Sascha gets another box and starts with the piles of clothes stacked up by the sofa. Mischa comes in and shuts the door to behind him.

“I’ll help. We’ll both help, huh?” He sets Junior down, and he stumbles over to Sascha. At some point over this weird, blurry year, his nephew has turned from a chubby little baby to a little boy. Time is a trip.

“_Dyadya Shurik_,” he says and thumps the top of one of the boxes with his fat little fist.

“Let’s help uncle Sascha pack, huh?” Mischa says. Sascha has to turn around and pretend to sneeze because blinking back tears isn’t working any more.

“You need to come,” he says thickly. “To Greece, I mean. Once we’re settled in. All three of you. Have a holiday with us.”

“Get to know my brother-in-law,” Mischa adds.

“Yeah,” Sascha says. “That would be nice.”

“Me and Evi are probably going to move, too. Not too far. She likes the idea of Nice, she’s been learning French. And, I dunno. I think I might put some space between me and dad as well.”

Sascha nods at that, and looks over at Junior, who has found a stack of magazines and is enthusiastically flipping through them. When Mischa told him Evi was pregnant- and he was the first person he told- his only thought was that there was another little one for Alexander to pin all his hopes on. Another life for him to twist to his own purposes. He leans over the box he and Mischa are packing and hugs him tight and says _I love you, dummy_, and hopes that conveys how happy he is that the two of them are breaking that cycle.

“Are you not bringing this stuff?” Mischa points to the pile in the corner. Racquets and tubes of balls and practice kits and trophies.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m not coming back.”

“OK,” Mischa says. His voice is as light as Sascha feels.

That night he has dinner alone on the balcony. He orders pizza because he’s too lazy to cook, and anyway, he’s given all his cutlery to a local charity shop. He doesn’t want to bring too much stuff from this flat to Greece. He doesn’t believe in bad energy and all that hippy shit, but he wants to start over. He Facetimes Stef while he eats and he tells him everything Mischa says, and the picture is a little blurry because of the distance, but Stef’s eyes look a little shiny when he mentions Junior. Not that he’s one to talk- as soon as Mischa left, Sascha curled up under his duvet and bawled for half an hour straight.

“I love you,” Stef says, as they say goodnight. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah,” Sascha says. “See you soon, _lapochka_.”

He puts his phone in his pocket- the screen’s still cracked- and gets up.

There is shouting and crying and when he’s done Sascha’s throat feels raw, but it’s over. There’s nothing they don’t know now. His heart burns for the way his mother simply stood back, her head hanging, and let Alexander scream at him.

_You can’t bleed for them for the rest of your life_, Stef texts him. Sascha screenshots it, and years later, he still looks at it.

***

They don’t spend long in the flat in Athens. They go on another holiday after a few months, to Kos, and they fall in love. The mountains and the white beaches, the green and grey and azure. The history that looms over them. The people in the tavernas who seem to love them like family after a single night. They get up early one morning to take a walk and catch the sunrise. On their way back, they pass a house crouched on the lip of a cliff. There’s a ‘for sale’ sign up. They both stop. There are hanging baskets all over the façade and a loose gravel path that snakes down to a wooden gate. Red tiles, whitewashed walls, higgledy-piggledy and like it’s missing something. A family.

“Jump over the fence,” Stef says. He elbows Sascha in the side.

“Huh?”

“Jump over the fence and stand in the front yard, I want to see something.”

Sascha frowns at him but does as he says. Stef takes a step or two back to survey the tableau. _Yes_, he thinks- Sascha there, in the front garden, the house and the flowers and the sparkling spring day. _That’s right_.

They move in the following month.

And one day, a few months later, Sascha comes in from town with a bag full of groceries and calls, “_Lapochka_, I’m home.” And he finds Stef sitting in the garden, at the table, hunched over his laptop, furiously typing what looks like a script. Sascha hugs him from behind and smells his warm outdoor smell.

“Saschenka,” Stef murmurs in greeting. “I’m nearly done here, let’s have dinner.”

And after dinner they go to bed. The windows are open to an airless night and a carpet of stars above their heads.

“You said home,” Stef says. He’s wrapped around Sascha and kissing his neck in that way Sascha knows.

“This is home,” Sascha says.

“Good,” Stef says.

They fuck for the first time that night. Stef rides him, shows him what he likes, shows him how to open him up and how to move his hips so it hits the spot. He comes hard and loud and a nest of birds are disturbed from the tree outside and fly away with a sudden sound. They collapse into giggles and into each other. _I love you I love you I love you_.

And the next morning they swap, and Stef shows Sascha how good it feels the other way. He tries to be as gentle as possible and kisses him furiously when he hears him squeak with pain. It’s worth it when he has Sascha’s legs over his shoulders and he’s driving into him, when Sascha is gasping, has his head tipped right back, hands scrabbling out in every direction for something to hold onto. Stef pulls back a bit and shifts position. He takes Sascha’s hands in his.

“Like this, Saschenka,” he whispers, and starts again.

***

“Fucking- scramble, you pricks!”

This is followed by the sound of several heavy things falling to the ground, and more swearing, so Stefanos hightails it out of bed and downstairs. He finds Sascha in the kitchen, the French windows cast open onto a breezy summer’s morning, light streaming in and the frying pan billowing smoke.

“Fucker!” Sascha is scraping the pan with a spatula to no apparent avail. “Fucking useless excuse for a frying pan.”

“A bad workman blames his tools,” Stefanos says in English. Sascha whips round and scowls at him.

“Elisavet really struck gold when she gave you that book of proverbs for your birthday, huh?”

His voice is bitter and venomous but Stef knows there’s nothing to it. He comes up behind Sascha and winds himself round his skinny waist.

“Morning,” he murmurs into the shell of Sascha’s ear.

“I was trying to make you breakfast,” Sascha says mournfully. Stef kisses the soft spot of skin behind his ear.

“I can see that,” Stef says.

“I was trying to do something nice for our anniversary.”

“But instead you cooked?”

Sascha turns round to shove him but he dives out of the way in time.

“Asshole. I can cook.” This is a blatant lie, but it’s their anniversary, so Stef doesn’t push it.

“I appreciate the effort,” he says instead.

“I fucked it up,” Sascha says. He sounds truly miserable, and he’s biting the side of his thumb, and Stef can’t resist him when he does that.

“It’s OK,” he says. He pulls him into another tight hug and kisses his temple. “We can fix it.”

And they do.

Dinner is a nice restaurant, which means driving into town, which means Sascha putting the radio on full blast and singing along. They even get dressed up.

“You look good tonight,” Sascha says when the waiter has seated them. They know them here, know to put them at a table out of the way but still with a view of the harbour.

“I look good every night,” Stef says. Sascha kicks him lightly with his foot. “You look lovely, too,” he adds, and even leans forward to kiss him. Every day, he marvels at how far they’ve come.

  
“So.” Sascha twirls a forkful of spaghetti (and that reminds Stef of the time Fabio Fognini told them that the word for that in Italian is _forchettare_, and he and Sascha made it all of five seconds before collapsing into giggles). “Five years with me.”

“Half a decade,” Stef says, and they shudder in unison.

“Gross,” Sascha says. “How’s it going? Are you enjoying being married to me?”

Stef rolls his eyes. This is a conversation they have every year.

“I love being married to you,” he says. “If I didn’t, I would have divorced you, and sued you for your fortune.” Another old joke: it’s Stef who has the fortune, now, especially since _Cinnamon_ won Best Picture at the Oscars a few years ago and everyone decided he was the best thing since sliced bread, or Martin Scorsese. Sascha runs a dog sanctuary (one that refuses to put a single healthy dog down and is constantly begging for food donations), and has been written out of his parents’ will. When it doesn’t make him too sad to think about, Sascha jokes about being a kept man.

“Good,” Sascha says. If Stef squints, he thinks he can hear something like relief in Sascha’s voice, and his heart gives a little twinge of sadness. He takes Sascha’s hand.

“I love being married to you too.” He’s worrying his napkin with his free hand and Stef’s about to say something, change the subject, but then Sascha speaks.

“I think we should adopt,” he says, all in a rush.

“Adopt,” Stef says.

“A child. We should adopt a child and become parents and raise a child.” His voice is fast and nervous.

“OK-”

“Or more than one. Mischa has three, I want four. Is four too much? Your parents had four-”

“Four isn’t too much,” Stef says.

Sascha stares down at his plate of pasta and then back up at Stef. “Sorry. It’s a lot, I know, I don’t want to make you feel like- but me and Dr Theodopolous were talking about it, and he thinks we’re ready, now might be a good time, with the law being passed last year, and the shelter winning that award. But only if you want to.”

(Stef doesn’t ask what Sascha talks about with Dr Theodopolous. Bit by bit he is starting to explain more, but Stef doesn’t push. Every time Sascha tells him something else, some new bit of misery that he’s endured, Stef has to go for a long walk to clear his head. He is so proud, though, of how hard Sascha is working. He has much better control of his temper now, and his nightmares are less and less frequent, and on those occasions when Stef finds him sitting very still with a blank stare he lets Stef distract him and bring him out of his head.)

“I want to,” Stef says. He squeezes Sascha’s hand, then kisses his knuckles for good measure. “I _really_ want to.”

“It’ll be difficult. With work and stuff.”

“I’ll finish _A Bend in the River_, and I’ll come back from India, and we can start then. Next year, right?”

“But then- you’ll want to make another film, and you’ll be gone again, and it’s bad enough when it’s just me missing you…”

“I’ll take a few years off,” Stef says. He keeps his voice level and calm like he knows to. Raising his voice, even if he wants to, even if he’s trying to cut off Sascha’s babbling, is the quickest way to get Sascha to shut down. “I can afford to, now. And then when the baby’s in school, I’ll work again, and I’ll make sure I only shoot in Europe, and we’ll work out a schedule so I’m never away longer than a week.”

“OK,” Sascha says. Stef watches him come down from the heights of anxiety. _So proud_. “OK. But you want to?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not pressuring you-”

“Saschenka,” he says, “I’ve wanted to be a parent with you since we met.”

“Oh,” Sascha says. “OK. Good. You be a fancy film director and I’ll be your househusband, chasing after the kids.”

“My _sexy_ househusband,” Stef corrects, “The one all the mums at the school gate want to cheat with.”

Sascha laughs and turns his face towards the sea. The sunlight brings out the blue sparkle in his eyes. It all unfolds before them in their silent reflection: the paperwork, the waiting, bringing their baby home for the first time. The sleepless nights, the first steps, a tiny little life calling them _papa_ for the first time. School plays and Cub Scouts and swimming lessons. Being boring and tired and going to bed early. Getting old together. A family.

Stef’s heart sings and he shuts his eyes to the sunset.


End file.
